Roe Ethridge - Shelter Island

Press release | February 2016

Foam presents Shelter Island, the newest work of Roe Ethridge (1969, US). At the eastern end of Long Island, New York, the photographer turned to his family and the characteristically American ‘Kit House’ they rented for the summer of 2015. There he became fascinated by a range of stored away possessions from the homeowners and their children.

Employing an array of classic photographic genres – from portraiture to still life to landscape – Ethridge captures his subjects and surrounding environment in intimate detail. The artist combines the glossy effect of commercial photography with the sensitivity of fine art photography. The outcome is a body of work that is both familiar and uncanny, and nostalgic as well as contemporary.

Evocative and cozy, the objects as props narrate a lifetime of childhood summers spent in a distinctly American tradition. We see stacked Coca-Cola bottles, a boy playing with a baseball bat, a colourful kite. Shelter Island, however, is less of an idealisation of these symbols than a melancholic expression of the end of summer malaise. The sun shines brightly in these images, yet a bouquet of flowers is seen well past its prime, the bottles appear neglected and gathering dust, and the kite is seen plunged into water and inert. An image of Pamela Anderson eating grapes and a grid of iPhone screenshots made by the artist’s daughter expand the Shelter Island story. In Ethridge’s specific technique, the passage of time, and of youth, is made both personal and intimate, yet stylised and highly mediated.

ABOUT ROE ETHRIDGE
Roe Ethridge was born in 1969 in Miami, Florida, and lives and works in New York. His photographs have appeared in solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow; and Le Consortium, Dijon, France. Ethridge has also been included in group exhibitions at notable institutions including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Barbican Center, London; MoMA PS1, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

The exhibition will be opened on Thursday 7 April, you are welcome from 5.30pm onwards. At 6.30pm there will be an interview with the artist and curator Zippora Elders.