PHOTO: Roe Ethridge-American Polychronic
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
Roe Ethridge presents new works in his solo exhibition “American Polychronic”. Moving within and between photographic genres, from art historically informed portraiture and still-life composition to the styled and coded world of the fashion shoot and the bottomless well of stock and online imagery, Ethridge juxtaposes staged scenes with chanced-upon vignettes, pursuing a formal language that trades in visual friction and the wry transgression of structural rules. His ever-expanding catalogue of hybrid images reflects the textures of contemporary American society, expanding on a formal sensibility peculiar to the “generic Methodist, Southern, middle-class world” in which he grew up. “Polychronic essentially means to do more than one thing at a time”, Ethridge explains of the exhibition’s title. “It’s also a way to describe a cultural notion of time. In the moment, it feels like we are all polychronic by choice or by necessity.” Thus, the term connotes the influence of overlapping contexts on the unfolding of events across a multiverse of images. In Ethridge’s new monograph, images produced for exhibition over the course of twenty-four years are arranged from oldest to most recent, while commercial and editorial photographs appear in the opposite order. The much more focused selection of works on view in the exhibition makes use of the New York gallery space to highlight resonances between the images; in its restrained design, the installation forms an effective counterpoint to the densely packed feel of the book. “Story of my life up to now or Red Tray with Mushroom Clock” (2022), is the exhibition’s defining image. Echoing the collage-like effect of Ethridge’s iconic “Refrigerator” (1999), this still-life photograph depicts an assortment of objects, including the titular kitschy ceramic timepiece. Placed on the left of the shot, it marks the starting point of a loose autobiographical narrative. “FvK Double Trouble” (2022) is more concerned with the camera’s relationship to its own products. The titular initialism, which stands for “Fuji versus Kodak,” alludes to a corporate opposition that embodies the artifice of the medium, restaging the history of photography as a story of technological advancement. This work too recalls Refrigerator’s vernacular grid, and shows Ethridge standing coolly back from his subjects rather than presenting them as aspects of an intuitive modus operandi.
Photo: Roe Ethridge, Story of my life up to now or Red Tray with Mushroom Clock, 2022, Dye sublimation print on Dibond, 48 x 72 inches / 121.9 x 182.9 cm, Edition of 5, © Roe Ethridge, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 976 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 13/1/25/2/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/
