Steidlville

The mood of Roe Ethridge’s Rockaway, NY suggests a nostalgic depiction of scenes from a coastal village. The snow covered boardwalk, the cemetery, the shops in town, and a quiet street in late summer all appear at first glance to be genre scenes, revealing Ethridge’s casual application of diverse pictorial modes and themes. The locales blend, imitate and disguise one another. Photographed in disparate geographical sites, from St Barts to upstate New York, Ethridge plays the roles of both a thematic archivist and a wandering narrator, mappin an uncertain ground in which it is unclear if the representation is a blank image, nothing more than the sum of it’s surface, or the fountainhead of some deeper significance.