Roe Ethridge
Old Fruit
October 2010
Published by Bywater Bros. Editions, Toronto
and Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver.
Ink jet print on archival paper
12.5 x 10 inches / 31.7 x 24.4 cm
Lettered edition of 26, plus 4 APs
Roe Ethridge (American, born 1969) studied photography at the Atlanta College of Art. He shoots in “editorial mode” and borrows images already in circulation, including outtakes from his own commercial work, sometimes already published in other contexts. “Everything seems to end up in a magazine sooner or later,” Ethridge has said, (in fact “Old Fruit” was featured on the cover of the 2010 photo issue of Vice magazine).
Drawing upon the descriptive power of photography and the ease with which it can be accessed, duplicated, and recombined, the artist orchestrates visual fugues, juxtaposing, for example, a picture in which he has superimposed an image of a plain white plate, grabbed from Bed Bath & Beyond’s website, on a checkered Comme des Garçons scarf; a photograph of a model dressed in an Alexander McQueen shirt posing against a tripod, which he took at Pier 59 in New York; two fi lmic pictures of a Julliard ballet student; a still life of moldy fruit; a catwalk shot from the Chanel spring 2009 fashion show grabbed from The New York Times; an image of a pumpkin that is a magnifi ed close-up of a sticker; and a picture of a red bag in a corner of the artist’s studio. The pictures acquire their meaning from the salient way in which they have been shuffl ed, sequenced, and laid out in nonlinear narrative structures. Combining and recombining already recontextualized images, Ethridge at once subverts the photographs’ original roles and renews their signifying possibilities.
Text from the Museum of Modern Art’s website.
$1,500
Released in conjunction with the artist book Lynn Valley 6 (with Cheyney Thompson)
