Roe Ethridge

In Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel Remainder, a nameless protagonist spends years trying to recreate past scenarios after an accident leaves him with amnesia. In interviews, the photographer Roe Ethridge has often likened his artistic practice to a similar-sounding ‘fugue state’, a condition of amnesia and disoriented travel. Earlier shows, like the 2008 exhibition at Andrew Kreps in New York called Rockaway Redux, encompassed the feeling of waking up on a beach with no idea of how one got there. This fugue strategy resists linear logic, moving with only scattered recollections as guides.

For his recent solo at Capitain Petzel, Sacrifice Your Body (shown simultaneously at Andrew Kreps) Ethridge began an exercise in recreation by digging up latent personal associations both formal (the angle of an arm, a certain shade of lilac) and narrative (the story of a football game). The photographs loosely revolve around his relationship with his mother, stemming from a 2011 trip he made to her hometown in Florida. Many were shot on-site; others are re-creations of tropes he remembers from adolescence. The result is a stylized, refracted view of suburbia: part travelogue, as in a photo of the rental car that he accidentally drove into a canal (Durango in the Canal, Belle Glade, FL, 2011), part cereal-box cliché (Hilary with Footballs (Big), 2013), part glamourized re-enactment (Gisele on the Phone, 2013). Despite their faded source material, the images are crisp, vivid and saturated, with graphic compositions and spot-lit subjects.

The show is rife with near-doubles, false symmetries, and thick shadows. In Bonne Maman Jar Is (2013), a jam jar sits nearly-centered on a white-painted wooden table, its skewed shadow almost the same size as the object. The red checkered lid and the twin stripes behind it are repetitive patterns of the type found in many other photos: in the yellow-on-black polka dots of Gisele Bündchen’s zipped jacket as she holds a phone to her ear against a white tiled wall, or Double Ramen (2013), two close-ups of dry, squiggly noodle blocks overlaid side-by-side – mirrored images just barely avoiding symmetry along a centered line. Minor idiosyncracies, like the ever-so-slightly asymmetrical stitching on a Chanel label (Chanel Tag, 2013), remind us that that, no matter how doctored, the images have real origins. Or were the imperfections rendered ex post facto to retain an illusion of the real?

A double image carries connotations of fakeness or superficiality. The photograph Surface (2013) shows brown leaves atop a blue surfboard; Chanel No.5 with Yellow Jacket (2009) is a sort of memento mori for the lifeless fashion industry: perfume packaging with a wasp on top. These are heavy-handed gestures, albeit in the context of deliberate superficiality. The phrase ‘sacrifice your body’ on the eponymously titled 2013 photograph is taken from an American football slogan and signifies disembodiment in the face of consumerism. Yet in this context it also refers to the figure of the artist’s ‘sacrificial’ mother.

Ethridge is known for his effortless crossover between fine art and commercial photography. But his best work moves far beyond the stale question of whether his images are ‘selling something’. They mine both personal and commercial associations in search of common memory – the near-symmetrical, near-cliché that we nonetheless can’t quite place. Like McCarthy, he exposes how all reality is ‘second-hand’.

Ethridge has become such an expert at making images in various contexts that even in a self-induced fugue state, there are no missteps to be found in this impeccable body of work. The key to McCarthy’s novel is that the main character’s wild attempts to represent reality become entirely self-defeating. Here, Ethridge has succeeded, cleanly and attractively. So what’s left when you’re right?