Roe Ethridge
Roe Ethridge: Smoke for Ice and Fire (Kitchen Dressing Room)
$500
From October 2020 through March 2021, The Kitchen presented Ice and Fire, a benefit exhibition featuring artworks by over fifty artists from throughout the organization’s community. Organized by artists and Board Members Wade Guyton and Jacqueline Humphries, the exhibition was installed on all floors of The Kitchen’s three-story building on 19th Street in Chelsea. On the occasion of this exhibition and in celebration of The Kitchen’s 50th anniversary in 2021, Roe Ethridge created this special photographic edition.
The photograph, taken at The Kitchen in February 2021, is part of an untitled series of images that document The Kitchen’s 19th Street space before a planned renovation takes place. In his work, Ethridge uses the real to suggest—or disrupt—the ideal. In documenting The Kitchen and the many layers embedded in its floors from 36 years of programming, Ethridge continues his practice of revealing the fine line between the generic and the personal, merging art-historical genres with the increasingly pervasive image culture of the present.
A limited edition exclusive to The Kitchen, this work is also launched on the occasion of The Kitchen Gala Benefit honoring Debbie Harry and Cindy Sherman—two iconic artists whose own pasts intersect with The Kitchen’s. Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills made their New York premiere at The Kitchen in 1980, and Harry participated the same year in Dubbed in Glamour, a three-day extravaganza of music, performance, and video organized by Edit DeAk at The Kitchen. Ethridge’s photograph reanimates this history in capturing Robert Mapplethorpe’s unmistakable 1982 portrait of Harry with The Kitchen's current dressing room.