DAVID GIBSON WRITING

Pigeon (2001), C-print, 38 x 30 inches The relationship between a photograph's overt appearance and the technical ability of the artist is what inspires Roe Ethridge. His second solo exhibition, "The Bow," stresses an interest in nature both as a physical subject and as a process of realistic depiction. Ethridge could be considered a traditional artist, since his images are often either figures or landscapes. Each image is beautiful, yet each image of beauty obscures, or exacts through ironic counterpoint, an unseen context. The most blatantly romantic images, such as those in his "New York Water" series, Osgood Pond and Catskills , present what seem like nature pictorials straight out of Hallmark cards: the haze of late summer covering a large pond seen through a rise of fir trees, and a stream bubbling merrily through a bucolic landscape. Yet hidden in the obvious details are reasons why beauty lies to us, and why we let it. Nature is a backdrop of beautiful

The idea of celebrity is completely fused with our perspective of everyday reality. Celebrity is a component of fame, a more momentary and satisfying instance in which the illumination of flash bulbs, the “royal treatment” of celebrity peers, and the adoration of unnamed masses all act to separate us from those from whom we bear away a large part of our common nature. As a subject for art, celebrity presents a slippery slope full of hidden agendas, mixed messages, and a breadth of cultural context which is rarely plumbed, for fear it may reveal the collusion between greatness and its opposite. Yet one artist today has made celebrity his main focus. David Henry Brown Jr, over the last few years, has developed an expansive body of work which explores these ideas. The first part of this exploration took the form of a series of actions, subtly interwoven into the social fabric of given public events. Brown invented a company in ‘98 called Carpet Rollers, which for $99 offered to roll out a