By Marcus Civin, March 10, 2025
A photograph of a hand holding a spray nozzle opens “Shore Front Parkway”, Roe Ethridge’s eleventh exhibition with Andrew Kreps Gallery in Tribeca, which was on view through March 1 and accompanied by a limited-edition book. Thanks to editing in Photoshop, the water coming from the spray nozzle stops mid-spurt. The photograph’s title, “Hand with Dramm” (2023) refers to the corporation that makes the watering tool. According to their website, the florist John Dramm invented the prototype in 1941, and his family built an empire selling it. Does the picture suggest anxiety—about water scarcity fueled by corporate waste and suburban lawn cultivation, or other things; lives that end too soon?
Ethridge, who was born in Miami in 1969 and grew up in Atlanta’s cookie-cutter sprawl, seems to be working through a suburban dad phase with this show. As he is well-known for doing, he toggles between diverse types of colloquial photography, in this case exploring aging and the psychogeography of locales like the Rockaways—the wave-kissed and hurricane-vulnerable edge of the New York borough of Queens where he lives and works. “Lee Lou, Menemsha Beach”(2020) is a close-cropped portrait of the artist’s teenage daughter in Martha’s Vineyard radiating youth. She’s sun-soaked, happy, and wearing a floppy orange-pink hat the color of a seashell. On the other hand, a trio of photographs spread throughout the exhibition, each titled “Glowing Orb on 91st and Shore Front Parkway” (2024) show a light laying in a bed of flowers, resembling a buoy that drifted ashore and suggesting things out of place. Similarly, “Others Pick-up Counter Still Life” (2024) an arrangement of beachcombed bric-a-brac, includes a washed-out publicity shot of Kate Bush, the now sixty-six-year-old English singer-songwriter as a young woman. She’s trapped in an ill-fitting thrift store frame. Ten years Ethridge’s senior, the artist seems to identify with the aging star idealized in her youth. In his photograph, she has literally faded.
Flowers or produce appear in about half of the twenty-one photographs on view. Many are ambivalent setups that could have been rejected from Better Home & Gardens for being too rough-hewn and maudlin, still lives arguably meant to be reminders of death—nature morte. Back at the beginning of the show, “Flowers in a Pizza Sauce Can “ (2020) depicts blooms in a makeshift vase placed too close to a rock’s edge. On close inspection, the clippings look a touch blurry, as if unsettled by a slight wind. Pastene is the name of the pizza sauce brand. Fitting for Ethridge, Pastene sounds like pastiche, French for imitation. In a 2022 interview, the artist recalled that early in his career, he thought, “What if I worked as a commercial photographer and made the images that Richard Prince is appropriating?”
Ethridge here looks more wholesome and less blunt than the older American artist, but the two still share a heteronormative drive. Central to the show, Ethridge’s “This is Not a Cigarette”(2023) is a sexualized riff on a famous work by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte, “The Treachery of Images”(1929), that juxtaposes an illustration of a tobacco pipe with the words, in French, “this is not a pipe.” Over time, the painting has become a recurring player in discussions of the disintegration of literal meaning. Writing in response to Magritte in the 1970s, Michel Foucault, for example, predicted that there would come a day when “the image itself, along with the name it bears, will lose its identity.”
“This is Not a Cigarette” features a reclining model in designer shoes and gown holding an oversized faux cigarette made from PVC pipe. Although Ethridge certainly functions in a time where both language and image are degraded—stomped on even—his return to last-century nicotine advertising feels oddly wistful, like a tedious message in a bottle or a poster on the wall of dad’s man cave, evidence of someone clutching at youth slipping their grasp. As much as anyone, Ethridge knows we live in alarming times. Parts of the Rockaways could be underwater well before his daughter gets to be his age. “Shore Front Parkway” is nostalgic not only for earlier selves and earlier times, it’s also nostalgic for the current moment, for this time, for everything that could soon become outmoded, that we might be holding for the last time, that inevitably we stand to lose.
Marcus Civin is a writer who lives in Brooklyn. He has written recently for ArtReview, BOMB, Boston Art Review, and Camera Austria, among other publications.
ROE ETHRIDGE "Hand With Dramm" 2023 Courtesy of the Artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery.
ROE ETHRIDGE "Karen and Bunnie" 2024. Courtesy of the Artist and the Andrew Kreps Gallery.
ROE ETHRIDGE "Lee Lou, Menemsha Beach" 2020 Courtesy of the Artist and the Andrew Kreps Gallery.
ROE ETHRIDGE "Others Pick Up Counter Still Life" 2024 Courtesy of the Artist and the Andrew Kreps Gallery.
ROE ETHRIDGE "This is Not a Cigarette" 2023. Courtesy of the Artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery.