North Carolina Museum of Art

Anthony Goicolea

21c Museum (Louisville, Ky.)

Alter Ego: A Decade of Work by Anthony Goicolea docu­ments the artist's first retrospective exhibition, presenting nearly fifty compelling works of art representing the bold and varied scope of Goicolea's career to date. Born in 1971 in Atlanta, Georgia, Anthony Goicolea is a first-generation Cuban American artist now working in Brooklyn, New York. Employing a variety of media, Goicolea explores themes ranging from personal history and identity, to alienation and displacement, to environmental destruction and globalization. His diverse oeuvre encompasses black-and-white and color photography, sculpture and video installations, and multi-layered drawings and paintings on Mylar. Goicolea's ability to move with ease between traditional media, such as painting and drawing, to video and digital photography, has put him at the forefront of contemporary art. Published by the North Carolina Museum of Art and Telfair Museums Exhibition Itinerary North Carolina Museum of Art Raleigh, North Carolina April 17-July 24, 2011 Telfair Museums: Jepson Center Savannah, Georgia September 2, 2011-January 8, 2012 21c Museum Louisville, Kentucky January 27, 2012--July 15, 2012

Alter Ego : a Decade of Work by Anthony Goicolea

Goicolea

Across the specific differences among Goicolea's works, the artist tirelessly excavates human weakness, awkwardness, and discomfort. Toward the end, he returns again and again to his themes of adolescent sexuality, unflinching self-exploration, and the never-ending contest between victims and victimizers. We are torn between the desire to witness these strivers and underdogs evolve gloriously into calm, powerful grown-ups and wanting to observe the Peter Pans as they play out the piercing struggles of adolescence-such apt metaphors for the rest of life's battles -- into eternity. Jennifer Dalton Recently, I have begun working on a series of video projects in which the narrative structure is generated and depicted through the progression of time. As in my photos, I am interested in self-portraiture, vanity, and narcissism, as well as issues revolving around the body, bodily functions, beauty, chaos, the grotesque and the perverse. The videos introduce the element of time into my narratives. I am interested in using this element to chronicle the gestation period of progressive states which ultimately end in destructive or absurd predicaments. Anthony Goicolea Anthony Goicolea has set the art world on its ear with these disturbing, provocative images. Exploiting his own boyish appearance, and with the help of body doubles and computer effects, he's cloned himself (all the faces in the photographs are his) in coming-of-age narratives that evoke both fondness and horror. The self portraits depict him (and his clones) indulging in all kinds of boys-will-be-boys mischief...where desire is unfixed and sometimes alarmingly off-kilter. This, the artist's first book, includes a DVD of his fiveshort films.

alter ego : a decade of work by Anthony Goicolea

The sense of foreboding tinged with playful fantasy characteristic is mimicked in a suite of figurative line drawings on mylar. Androgynous figures of indeterminate age float on top of and through each other in a layered composition separated by planes of Plexiglas and semi-opaque vellum paper. The ghostlike figures are caught in free-floating, awkward, transitional states - sometimes their images are doubled; sometimes they seem like as much animal as human. Optically, the figures fade in and out of each other in a series of tentative lines that read like traces of previous drawings and refer to memory and transition. The figures' relationship to the water's horizon line seems to shift within a single drawing. This horizontal reference point separates air from water and reality from fantasy while it transforms the swimmers' shapes and sizes. This shift mimics the play of light through water, seeming to pass through the two worlds and to fracture the figure caught between them. These absurd predicaments strive to provoke conflicting emotions in the viewer.

Anthony Goicolea

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