Happy Birthday Louise Parker is the first solo exhibition in Italy by the American photographer Roe Ethridge (Miami, 1969) curated by Alessandro Rabottini. Of the language of photography, Ethridge explores historical implications and contemporary paradoxes, seamlessly navigating the realms of visual art and fashion photography through a distinctive and unconventional style.
Conceived especially for 10·Corso·Como, Happy Birthday Louise Parker brings together a selection of iconic photographs from the past 15 years alongside previously unreleased works, fusing themes and subjects that, at a first glance, may appear unrelated to each other: elaborate still lives, accurately staged fashion shots, melancholic landscapes, and intimate portraits. Images are skilfully juxtaposed to forge visual connections, unravel contrasts, and weave narratives, and despite the diversity of their atmospheres, what connects them all is a formal rigour that is as haunting as it is arresting, if not confrontational at times.
The exhibition draws its title from the alluring presence of Louise Parker, a model with whom Roe Ethridge collaborated with on the occasion of several fashion editorials starting from 2010. Throughout the years, the two became friends and Ethridge had the opportunity to portray Parker both inside and outside the framework of the fashion industry. We see the recurring, hypnotic image of Louise transitioning from highly stylised fashion spreads to more spontaneous, intimate portraits and back, manifesting the intertwining of life and representation, the everyday and the staged. In this collection of portraits, the gaze of the artist meets the self-aware gaze of the model, in a way that thematise and transcends the dynamic interplay between the photographer, the camera, and the subject, between the intentionality of the artistic vision and the intentionality of the pose.
Within this narrative in which Louise is present at different stages of her life - as an individual and as a model, as a woman and as a mother - Roe Ethridge inserts fragments of his own biography: a portrait of the artist together with his son at the age of 5 (Me and Auggie), his own sinked car salvaged from a muddy river in Belle Glade, the city in Florida where his mother grew up and where his parents met in High School (Durango in the Canal) , more recent portraits of his children taken during
moments of leisure (Lee Lou at Sunset Park Ferry Terminal, Auggie with Racoon Tail), and a digitally manipulated portrait of the artist at his 52nd birthday party (Birthday Multiply), the result of the superimposition of two different images, one taken from his daughter.
Within this non-linear storytelling, the relation between personal memories and the realm of fashion is revealed through the nuanced connections established between the images when installed in the space: fashion, in fact, is an ever-evolving discipline where trends emerge, flourish, and fade, each season serving as a poignant reminder of the cyclical nature of life.
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