PHOTO:Roe Ethridge-Beach Umbrella

In his photographs, Roe Ethridge uses the real 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 such as the still life or portrait with the increasingly pervasive image culture of the present.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Moving fluidly between the realms of fine art, fashion photography, stock imagery, and social media, Ethridge juxtaposes carefully staged scenes with vignettes from everyday life, pursuing a visual language that is, in his own words, “‘right’ in its wrongness.” Investigating the constant tension between chance occurrence and the photographer’s editorial eye, he produces surreal and theatrical images that reflect the textures of modern society. Roe Ethridge new photographs in his solo exhibition “Beach Umbrella”. On four Mondays in July and August last summer, Ethridge photographed an assortment of discarded umbrellas at Rockaway Beach, New York. Positioned against the sun, shot from beneath, and cropped to the point of near abstraction, the umbrellas fill each image from edge to edge with vibrant color, their wedges of luminous fabric stretched against graphic metal frames. In one picture, a broad, rainbow-hued umbrella arches over a volleyball and an open pack of cigarettes, casting the objects in a stark and foreign light. The resulting still life seems highly contrived, blurring the line between realism and artifice. Ethridge also explores additional unorthodox visual techniques throughout the series. In “Beach Umbrella with Cup and Flip Flops” (2020), he digitally montages multiple images atop each other: a palm tree–patterned umbrella intervenes with a pair of blue flip-flops, a discarded blue plastic cup, and a fallen red warning flag. With its strange geometries and crimson hue, the final composition evokes the multiplied warm-toned photographs printed on brass featured in Ethridge’s 2017 exhibition “Innocence II”. Other seemingly more straightforward images depict an untended and bent-over sunflower and the model Maryel Sousa in a swimsuit and faux fur coat with pink zinc on her nose, a beach umbrella slung over her shoulder. Haunting in their mundanity and utter solitude, these works exemplify Ethridge’s ability to evince uncanny and stylized forms through precise explorations of color, kitsch, and cultural symbolism.

Photo: Roe Ethridge, Beach Umbrella with Cup and Flip Flops, 2020, Dye sublimation print on aluminum, 40 × 53 inches / 101.6 × 134.6 cm, edition 1/5 + 2 AP, © Roe Ethridge, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 821 Park Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 1/7-27/8/2021, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-17:30, https://gagosian.com