ART CITIES:Brussels-Roe Ethridge
Roe Ethridge is known for exploring the plastic nature of photography, how pictures can be easily replicated and recombined to create new visual experiences. His focus is multiple and restless, capturing the vivid and intimate details of his various locales. He integrates conceptual photography with commercial work, including out-takes from his own shoots and borrowed images already in circulation in other contexts. With this democratic attitude, Ethridge works to capture the vivid and intimate details of his shifting locales within photography’s classic genres of portrait, landscape, and still life.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gladstone Gallery Archive
New works by Roe Ethridge are on presentation at Gladstone Gallery in Brussels. His new works serve as an extended meditation on genres and styles associated with the traditions of Dutch painting, particularly the still life, domestic scene, and portraiture. In Ethridge’s photographs the real is used to suggest, or disrupt, the ideal. Through commercial images of fashion models, products, and advertisements as well as intimate moments from his own daily life, he reveals the fine line between the generic and the personal, merging art-historical genres with the image culture of today. His portraits capture unexpected subjects, such as an inflatable alien toy, or the pre-teen drag queen Lactacia dolled up in Western wear. Kitschy salt and pepper shakers in the shape of turkeys replace the domestic abundance associated with still life painting—now covered in electric green slime, as if molded over or infected with American toxic masculinity. He uses patterns that seem like innocuous backdrops; and yet, in their repetition, emoji graphics, mycological spores, or even portraits of artist Richard Prince evacuate the illusion of tangible space, heightening tension within the construction of the image. This body of work coheres around the performative residue in the photograph’s reproduction of reality: relics of domestic comfort promote a sense of phoniness inherent in stylized nostalgia, while the enigmatic expression of a cover model looking up from her phone emphasizes both the subject’s and the viewer’s complicity in the fabrication of everyday life.
Info: Gladstone Gallery, 12 Rue du Grand Cerf, Brussels, Duration: 18/4-16/6/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-18:00, https://gladstonegallery.com
