Roe Ethridge. Happy Birthday Louise Parker
10·Corso·Como, Milan
From February 21st until April 5th, 2024
Roe Ethridge, through the photographic language, explores historical implications and contemporary paradoxes in both visual art and fashion photography with an iconic and unconventional style. With a career spanning more than 25 years, his work has gained international attention for its ability to observe and confound stereotypical notions of beauty, memory, commerce and representation. The exhibition Happy Birthday Louise Parker, specially conceived for 10·Corso·Como, and curated by Alessandro Rabottini, features iconic pictures from the past 15 years as well as previously unseen works, combining such diverse themes as complex still lives, meticulously staged fashion shoots, melancholy landscapes and intimate portraits. The images are juxtaposed to create visual connections, reveal contrasts and weave narratives with extreme formal rigor, at once seductive and provocative. The title refers to model Louise Parker, Ethridge’s longtime collaborator.
Louise’s image takes on a hypnotic significance over the course of the exhibition: we see her transiting from photographic sets conceived in every detail to more spontaneous and private portraits, thus manifesting the intertwining of life and representation, of everyday life and staging. In this series of portraits, the artist’s gaze meets the conscious gaze of the model, according to a rhythm that thematises and transcends the relationship of interaction between the photographer, the lens and the subject, between the intentionality of the authorial vision and that of the pose of those being portrayed. Within this narrative, Roe Ethridge inserts fragments of his own biography, making the artist’s intimate world a subject affected by the passage of time. Through a nonlinear narrative, relationships and frictions emerge between diaristic and commissioned images, fashion and individual memory. Ethridge’s practice, represented in digital compositions and overlapping image collages, explores the multiple spaces occupied by images, from advertising to the praise of the mundane, offering a glimpse into the creative process and demonstrating the continuous and diverse nature of images.
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