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27/4/2007

Anthony Goicolea

Postmasters Gallery, New York

Almost Safe

Almost Safe -- an exhibition of photographs, drawings and a 16mm film by Anthony Goicolea. Goicolea's exhibition is a gathering of "evidence" about a spiritually anemic and physically damaged world. Combining photographs of ruined landscapes, a wall-size drawing of tangled destruction, nineteenth century style portraiture, and a 16mm film, Goicolea elegantly portrays a future that simultaneously bears the repercussions of a capitalist present and the residue of a cold war, industrial past.

In these large-scale black and white photographs, the artist digitally composites elements culled from different locations and combines them into new topographies. Seemingly familiar elements such as telephone wires, power lines, and factories are juxtaposed in a way that torques reality and compresses space and time, creating subtly off-kilter and barely inhabitable worlds. The dense woodland environments of his earlier works are replaced with desolate urban and industrial wastelands that, like its few inhabitants, appear to be atrophying. The sky is a major character in many of the photographs. Thick-layered clouds dominate the composition or slide into the frame from above like an impending threat. This emphasis on the sky conjures Northen Europe's romantic and early nineteenth-century American landscape painters. Like those artists, Goicolea also de-emphasizes the human figure in favor of the landscape, alluding to an alienation or disconnection from their surroundings.

Goicolea, whose photographs are often energized by paradoxes, also alludes to the history of cinema, including Film noir, French new wave, and science fiction. The bombed out building in Deconstruction suggests the opening scene from Fellini's La Dolce Vita, the gondolas in Sky Lift are reminiscent of Orson Welles's The Third Man, and the skyline in Smoke Stack takes on a Dickensian quality. These familiar elements are catapulted into dreamlike scenes of decay that are displaced or dissolve into each other. The environments, however, undoubtedly come to us from the future, alluding to films that present palpable visions of post-industrial worlds, including Blade Runner and The Children of Men.

Drawings and a film installation are presented in a constructed corridor at the back of the gallery. The darkened hallway is lined with ten Mylar drawings of elderly men and women. These tightly cropped portraits are drawn in negative, featuring profiles or straightforward mug shots. Illuminated by small frame lights, the layered mylar and glass surfaces of the portraits resemble daguerreotypes. Here, Goicolea takes us from the macro to the micro, from the habitat to the objects created by its inhabitants. At the end of the darkened hall, a 16 mm camera projects a night scene punctuated by pulsing flashlights. The lights click in code as if a covert language were narrating the clandestine activities. At first the rhythm is slow and methodical, but it soon deteriorates into a luminous, chaotic chatter created by the darkened figures that patrol the area.

Opening: Saturday, April 28, 6:00PM - 8:00PM

Postmasters Gallery
West 19th Street & 10th Avenue - New York
Admission free

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