Rude in the Good Way

Rude in the Good Way explores desire as both subject and method within Roe Ethridge’s complex visual bricolage of commercial glamour, errant snapshots, private sexuality and studio play.

Working through his characteristically oblique, offhand style, Ethridge lets sexuality, identity, seduction and the camera drift into the same plane, never fully separating one from the other. Loosely woven fugues of images converge, always cheekily winking toward something just out of frame: technicolor flash typologies of mouldy peaches, hyper-composite images of Lindsay Lohan, and Chanel still lifes both luxurious and lurid move alongside intimate, dressed-down snapshots of Ethridge’s collaborator Lulu Sylbert, unresolved glimpses into painter John Currin’s erotically charged studio, sarcastic self-portraits, and constant callbacks to the unmistakable image world Ethridge has built over the past twenty years, where photographs refuse to be pinned down or left unstimulated.

These fragments ask us, like the title itself, what is rude and what is not. A polished image, a casual glitch, a throwaway snapshot, a luxury still life, a screenshot from a weather station webcam? Ethridge sharpens his polychronic world to a point where desire, consumption and self-presentation overlap so completely that the photographs begin to test our own appetites: what we see, what we want and how we perform.