Curated by Kevin Moore

Gathering more than sixty photographs (all but one made since 2000), a handful of sculptures, and a video making its debut, Roe Ethridge’s first US museum survey will provide a heady dose of the artist’s faux-generic, technically impeccable style—one of the post–Pictures generation’s most influential. Although his sleek, satiric take on advertorial-style fashion and still life is now pervasive, few imitators can match Ethridge’s witty mix of art and commerce, document and fiction. Even pictures that appear to be dumb documents help undermine antique notions of photographic truth: His perfect pumpkin is actually a shot of a sticker (Pumpkin Sticker, 2010), and in what is clearly a photograph of a Point Break movie poster, he has replaced Patrick Swayze’s head with a shaggy self-portrait (Untitled [Point Break], 2010). His tendency to produce what curator Kevin Moore calls a “synthetic version . . . of the reality we think we know” makes Ethridge a reliably destabilizing force; his seduction can turn into a sly slap in the face.

— Vince Aletti