Anthony Goicolea: De/Construction

Anthony Goicolea De/Construction

Anthony Goicolea De/Construction Publication © 2013 Essay by Ryan Steadman © 2013 Artist’s Images © Anthony Goicolea Van Every/Smith Galleries Davidson College 315 North Main Street Davidson, North Carolina 28035-7117 davidsoncollegeartgalleries.org

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

This publication was produced in conjunction with an exhibition of Anthony Goicolea’s work entitled De/Construction, featured at the Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, March 14 – April 18, 2013.

Design: Victor Coreas Art & Design Printing: ImageMark

COVER: D econstruction, 2007, chromogenic print mounted on aluminum and laminated with Plexiglas 72”x117.5,” Collection of Randy Shull and Hedy Fischer, Asheville, NC

Anthony Goicolea De/Construction

Anthony Goicolea De/Construction It is with great pleasure that the Davidson College Art Galleries present De/Construction, featuring the work of Anthony Goicolea. The Gallery supports Davidson College’s academic mission through the exhibition, interpretation, collection, and discussion of innovative works by nationally-acclaimed artists such as Goicolea. Gallery exhibitions and programs benefit students, members of the Davidson community, and public visitors alike, providing exposure to unique works of arts, creating interdisciplinary learning opportunities, and inspiring a lifelong commitment to the arts.

De/Construction presents a variety of media — photography, drawing, sculpture, and video — all centered around the theme of self. The artist’s explorations are deliberate and honest gestures toward constructing, deconstructing, destroying, recovering, assembling, and disassembling his own identity.

Sea Wall, detail, 2008 23 cast lead crystal blocks, 24 hand-polished, hand-blown glass bottles, each containing a graphite-on-Mylar drawing Courtesy of 21c Museum and Collection of Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, Louisville, KY

The Galleries extend heartfelt gratitude to Anthony Goicolea for his commitment to the project. We also wish to thank Ryan Steadman for his insightful essay. Last by not least, the Galleries wish to thank the following individuals and institutions, without whom this exhibition would not have been possible: 21c Museum and Collection of Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, Randy Shull and Hedy Fischer, Allen G. Thomas Jr., and Magdalena Sawon of Postmasters Gallery, New York City.

— Lia Newman, Director/Curator Van Every/Smith Galleries

The Politics of Self-Expression Ryan Steadman When does the personal become political in art? Ideally, it is when an artist wholly characterizes a minority group and is able to eloquently teach about their group’s growing prominence within a society. Anthony Goicolea is such an artist. Since the 1990’s, when “otherness” exploded onto the map of America’s cultural consciousness, Goicolea has been steadily building autobiographical photographs, drawings, sculptures, and films that express — without compromise — the feelings behind his sexual identity and racial background. Goicolea has proven to be an experimental and resourceful image-maker over the years, borrowing aesthetic inspiration from the film world (Fellini, Ridley Scott), literature (Dickens, Golding) and of course, fine art (Cranach, Constable, and Goya among others), all while drawing poignant relationships between his adoptive styles and his own personal history.

Deconstruction, a philosophical method based on the overturning of oppositions, is at the root of Goicolea’s politicized art. This term gained a foothold in the realm of visual arts with the debut of The Untitled Film Stills — a groundbreaking body of photographs by Cindy Sherman from the late 1970’s that aped the standard female characters of American cinema. As the Feminist Movement began to gain in prominence, Sherman’s affecting dissection of these stereotypical portrayals highlighted

the absurd constraints put upon American women. Work like The Film Stills encouraged all under-represented groups in America to raise their voices. By the early 1990’s, artists as diverse as Nayland Blake, Sue Williams, and Robert Mapplethorpe were using their personal experience to upend traditional ideas about race, sex, and sexuality. These voices also happened to surface as new media began to enter the art world, such as video art, installation art, and even the beginnings of computer art.

This is the milieu that formed the structure of Goicolea’s artistic ethos, one where all our old beliefs were being challenged and new art forms were suddenly finding acceptance. His breakthrough happened in 1996 thanks to a side job at an ad agency that involved learning a relatively new computer program called Photoshop. Applying this purely commercial application to his photographs opened up a new realm of possibilities for Goicolea. Stitching together a conglomerate of portraits in order to present assorted personas within a single image, Goicolea was not only able to discover new ways to deconstruct the fabrics that we take for granted in our society, but he was also able to reconstruct these narratives around his own lifestyle.

Goicolea utilized multiples of himself as a way to discuss issues surrounding his queerness, as well as his status as the son of a Cuban immigrant. As his work matured, Goicolea’s fantastical dramas became more subtle and varied, as is seen in the show’s title work Deconstruction, a large black and white photograph of a semi-destroyed apartment building

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of which the facade has been removed — exposing its dingy, barren interiors. Within each of these hollowed-out spaces, Goicolea has inserted images of elderly men and women resting beatifically in hammocks, while exposed metal rods and crumbling rubble dangle precariously around them.

Is this an expression of how the artist finds comfort as an outsider in society? Perhaps, but there is also tribute paid to Goicolea’s Cuban-American heritage, which brings with it the common experience of leaving one’s only known home in order to find freedom, even if as a transient living in the poorest of conditions. The moody, swirling clouds above these seniors are plucked almost verbatim from the tumultuous skies of romantic landscape painter, Caspar David Friedrich, becoming a fearsome symbol of the threat of the natural world on the refugee.

in Cuba. Are these boys working for the moral majority (looking to capture an escapee) or are they part of a small band of émigrés looking for a lost partner as they plan their silent exit? The jumble of economic diversity they float above only adds to the confusion. “Who are these boys?” asks Goicolea, speaking for an artist who feels like both an insider and an outsider in his own country.

Not to be forgotten is the fairy tale reverie of Goicolea’s charming “boy world” that is — a byproduct of the complex homosexual identity that informs much of his work.

All of these characteristics are food for Goicolea’s graphic depictions, which stand both as intricately composed and personal objects, yet also images that bear real political significance.

Goicolea eventually returned to formal drawing, a natural move for him to further explore narratives that fasten together antithetical imagery. Search Party, a large graphite and acrylic work on vellum, is an excellent example of how Goicolea pieces together a drawing, while still managing to create an image that looks and feels like a contemporary morality tale. Search Party shows a trio of masked boys, perhaps modeled after the artist himself, searching high above an amalgamation of a city in a hot air balloon. Radio towers and power lines hover menacingly over an odd mix of shanty houses and sweet neighborhood tudors, in what is possibly a variety of locales from Goicolea’s past. In this sutured image, the artist cleverly blurs the lines between his comfortable American upbringing and his ancestral home Code, 2007, still from single-channel video

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It’s not surprising that Goicolea eventually transitioned from photography to video, nor is it surprising that the same issues of identity come to the forefront of the artist’s time-based work. The short video Code is another inventive melding of the artist’s racial and sexual background, this time within the format of a minimalist performance, in which blinking and whirling flashlights within a dark forest create a coded dance that intensifies in speed and number as the video progresses. Code can be read as an acknowledgement of the closeted past of homosexuality (where codes were often used to determine sexual preference), yet it also reminds of the desperate emigrant trying to reach safety under the cover of night. Despite its simplicity, Code stylistically draws from a variety of influences, from early experimental performance pieces like 1966’s Nine Evenings, to classic ‘80s horror movies.

Last but hardly least, Goicolea’s sculptural works, specifically from his Related series, delve even further into his personal history. In Related, the focus is almost entirely on Goicolea’s Cuban roots — something that he has been unnaturally alienated from due to political agenda.

This reality hits home when you are confronted with the large-scale sculpture, Sea Wall, a luminous row of milky glass cinder blocks (referencing the ominous sea wall surrounding Cuba’s harbor known as the “Malecon”) that balance a row of delicate glass bottles, each containing an equally delicate pencil drawing of one of the artist’s known or unknown relatives. The ghostly translucent whiteness of this work speaks of an unknown past that exists both

idealized and estranged. Thanks to the artist’s first visit to Cuba and months of tireless research, Goicolea was able to create his most ambitious and intensely political work yet.

The beauty of Sea Wall lies within the pathos that Goicolea cannot help but emit to the viewer while on his personal journey of understanding.

Always evolving and always experimenting, Anthony Goicolea is one of the rare artists whose work rises above the nature of it’s medium, for each piece is an almost painful melding of the personal and the political. Self-expression and self-examination is second nature to this artist, who has no choice but to expose every aspect of his being, while offering the viewer the gift of being able to truthfully and empathetically relate to his art. For what could be truer to the artist than what he most intimately knows: Himself.

Ryan Steadman is an artist, curator, and critic living in Brooklyn, New York. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Karma, Envoy Enterprises, and Baumgartner Gallery, all in New York City. You can read his criticism at artforum.com and in Modern Painters Magazine.

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Migration (Flies), detail, 2011 graphite and ink on Mylar 42”x104” Courtesy of Anthony Goicolea and Postmasters Gallery, New York 6

Sea Wall, 2008 23 cast lead crystal blocks, 24 hand-polished, hand-blown glass bottles, each containing a graphite-on-Mylar drawing dimensions variable Courtesy of 21c Museum and Collection of Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, Louisville, KY

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Tides, 2008 graphite, ink, acrylic on Mylar 58”x42” Courtesy of Anthony Goicolea and Postmasters Gallery, New York 8

Self Portrait as Dorian Gray, 2012 left: acrylic and mixed media on mylar and Plexiglas; right: color photograph (reversed drawing) 25”x13” each panel Courtesy of Anthony Goicolea and Postmasters Gallery, New York

Related 1a, 2008 graphite on Mylar 17”x13”

Related 1b, 2008 black and white digital print 24.25”x19.5”

Collection of Allen G. Thomas Jr., Wilson, NC

Collection of Allen G. Thomas Jr., Wilson, NC 9

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Jettisoned, 2009 chromogenic print, mounted on aluminum and laminated 40”x40”

Disassembly, 2006 mixed media on Mylar 69.25”x41.5”

Courtesy of 21c Museum and Collection of Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, Louisville, KY

Collection of Allen G. Thomas Jr., Wilson, NC

Search Party, detail, 2007 acrylic and mixed media on Mylar, mounted on wood 96”x146” Courtesy of 21c Museum and Collection of Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, Louisville, KY 11

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Under I, 2001 chromogenic print 20”x16”

Under II, 2001 chromogenic print 20”x24”

Courtesy of 21c Museum and Collection of Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, Louisville, KY

Courtesy of 21c Museum and Collection of Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, Louisville, KY

Under III, 2001 chromogenic print 20”x18”

Under V, 2001 chromogenic print 20”x15”

Courtesy of 21c Museum and Collection of Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, Louisville, KY

Courtesy of 21c Museum and Collection of Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, Louisville, KY 13

Amphibians, 2002 still from single-channel video

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ANTHONY GOICOLEA | Born in Atlanta, GA, 1971 |

Lives and works in New York.

EDUCATION 1996 Pratt Institute of Art, MFA, Sculpture and Photography 1994 The University of Georgia, BFA, Drawing and Painting, Magna Cum Laude 1992 The University of Georgia, BA, Art History and Romance Languages, Magna Cum Laude 1989 La Universidad de Madrid SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2013 De/Constructed, Davidson College Art Galleries, Davidson, NC Wondering Wild, La Galerie Particuliere, Paris, France Monument, Ron Mandos Gallery, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Landscape, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand 2012 Alter Ego: A Decade of Work by Anthony Goicolea, 21c Museum, Louisville, KY Anthony Goicolea, Galeria Senda, Barcelona, Spain 2011 Pathetic Fallacy, Postmasters Gallery, NYC Alter Ego: A Decade of Work by Anthony Goicolea, NC Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC,

Telfair Museum, Savannah, GA, and 21c Museum, Louisville, KY Snowscape, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA 2010 Related, Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX DECEMBERMAY, ScheiblerMitte, Berlin, Germany Nailbiter, IKON Gallery, Birmingham, UK Home, Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam, The Netherlands 2009 Once Removed, Postmasters Gallery, NYC MCA Denver, Photography Gallery, Denver, CO The Last Man Standing: Retrospective of Photography & Video works, Fireplace Project, East Hampton, NY 2008 Related III, Sandroni Rey, Los Angeles, CA Related II, Haunch of Venison, London, UK Related I, Aurel Scheibler Gallery, Berlin, Germany Almost Safe, Monte Clark Gallery, Toronto, Canada 2007 The Septemberists, Sandroni Rey Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Almost Safe, Postmasters Gallery, NYC 15

The Septemberists, Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, Korea Haunch of Venison, ZĂźrich, Switzerland 2006 The Septemberists, Aurel Scheibler Gallery, Berlin, Germany Monte Clark Gallery, Toronto, Canada Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Canada Drawings, Sandroni Rey Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2005 Louis Adelatando Gallery, Miami, FL Estaciones, Galeria Luis Adelantado, Valencia, Spain Outsiders - Videos and Photographs, Cheekwood Museum of Art Museum, Nashville, TN Sheltered Life, Postmasters Gallery, NYC Anthony Goicolea, Photographs, Drawings and Video, The Arizona State University Museum of Art, Tempe, AZ 2004 Sheltered Life, Galerie Aurel Scheibler Cologne, Germany Kidnap, Sandroni-Rey Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Kidnap, Torch Gallery, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Tea Party, Madison Avenue Calvin Klein Space, NYC Anthony Goicolea, New Videos, Spazio, Milan, Italy Recent Works, New Photographs, Angstrom Gallery, Dallas, TX Boys Will Be Boys, The John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Cologne, Germany Sandroni Rey Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2003 Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Cologne, Germany Photos & Films, The GREEN BARN, Sagaponack, NY Gow Langsford, Sydney, Australia Gow Langsford, Auckland, New Zealand Cotthem Gallery, Barcelona, Spain Videos, Gallery 845/LAAA, Los Angeles, CA Cotthem Gallery, Brussels, Belgium Casa De America, Madrid, Spain Contemporary Center of Photography, Melbourne, Australia The Sargeant Gallery, Wanganui, New Zealand

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2002 Land, RARE Gallery, NYC Water, Sandroni-Rey, Los Angeles, CA Arizona State University Art Museum,Tempe, AZ Art Space, Auckland, New Zealand Neue Fotographien und Zeichnungen Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Cologne, Germany The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2013 Light Sensitive: Photographic Works from North Carolina Collections, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC 3am: Wonder, Paranoia and the Restless Night, The Blue Coat, Liverpool, UK 2011 Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, Brooklyn Museum, NY Camp: Visiting Day, Center For Photography, Woodstock, NY Late Sumer Blues, Storefront Gallery, Brooklyn, NY Performing for the Camera, Arizona Sate University Art Museum. Tempe, AZ Cuba Now, 21c Museum, Louisville, KY Dead_lines; Death in Art-Media-Everyday Life, von der Heydt Kunsthalle, Wuppertal, Germany 30: A Brooklyn Salon; Celebrating Thirty years of Contemporary Art, BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, NY Colorific: We Make an Art Rainbow, Postmasters Gallery, NYC 2010 Open Season, Flanders Gallery, Raleigh, NC Transparency and Trans-formations, US Embassy, Stockholm, Sweden Superfices del Deseo curated by Cecilia Delgado Masse, Museo Universario Arte Contemporaneo, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC Haunted – Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, Guggenheim Museum, NYC International Fotofestival, Cultuurcentrum Scharpoord, Knokke-Heist, Belgium IKON Gallery: Birmingham, UK 2009 Generation, Art Gallery of Alberta, Canada Masculine: Interpretations of Manhood, Charles Cowles Gallery, NY MI VIDA, From Heaven to Hell, Mucsarnok, Budapest, Hungary

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Mythologies, Haunch of Venison, London, UK

Group Show, Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada

International Photography, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand 2008 Darger-Ism: Contemporary Artists And Henry Darger, American Folk Art Museum, NY Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape, MASS MOCA, North Adams, MA Gen-X: Post-Boomers and the New South, Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL Oh l’amour, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ Amerika: Back to the Future, Postmasters Gallery, NYC People and Places: Selections from the Allen G. Thomas Jr. Photography Collection, Southeast

Center of Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC Rethinking Landscape: Contemporary Photography from the Allen G. Thomas Jr. Collection,

Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA Cobra to Contemporary, Artnews Projects, Berlin, Germany Boys of Summer, The Fire Place Project, East Hampton, NY 2007 Global Anxieties, The College of Wooster Art Museum, Wooster, OH Role Exchange, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, NY Behind Innocence, Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, Korea International Video Art Exhibition, Today Art Museum, Beijing, China Existencias, MUSAC, Museo De Arte Contemporeaneo De Castilla Y Leon, Spain Innocence Now, Artspace Witzenhausen, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Ich wars nicht, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, Germany Max, Durchfahrtshöhe, Galerie ScheiblerMitte, Berlin, Germany Best of KunstFilmBiennale, Apeejay Media Gallery, New Delhi, India New Directions in American Drawing, Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA Kunst Film Biennale, vertreten durch SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne, Germany OMINOUS ATMOSPHERE, Heather Marx Gallery, San Francisco, CA PLANO INTIMO, Ciclo de Videoarte, Sala Parpallo, Valencia, Spain SHELTER, Museum De Fundatie Zwolle, Heino, The Netherlands Contemporary Cool and Collected, Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC STALKING SUBURBIA, Westport Arts Center, Westport, CT Mat Collishaw & Anthony Goicolea, Haunch of Venison, Zurich, Switzerland 18

2006 The Hungry Eye, Chelsea Art Museum, NYC Arcadia, Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC Making a Scene, Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa, Israel Emotional Landscape, Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, NY Video Spirit: Mysteries, Myths, Meditation and the Moving Image, Installation Gallery at

Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, TN Krieg der Knöpfe, Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kraichtal, Germany, Kunstmuseum Aarhus, Denmark,

Landesgalerie, Linz, Austria Will Boys Be Boys? Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN Coolhunters, Kunsthalle, Budapest, Hungary Die Jugend von heute, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt/Main, Germany Middle Ground: Photographs from the Whitney Museum of American Art, Columbia University, NY Looped: Engages in Time, CAS Gallery, University of Miami, Miami, FL Modern Photographs, Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL Sensacions en Primeira Persona, CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, Spain Connivences, Collection Stéphane Janssen, Musée Dixelles, Brussels, Belgium and ASU Museum Cintas Exhibition, Finalists, The Buena Vista Building, Miami, FL 2005 Representing Representation VII, Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY In Focus, Contemporary Photography from the Allen G. Thomas Jr. Collection, NC Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC Western Biennale: The John Natsoulas Gallery, Davis, CA Desvelar Lo Invisible, Videocreacion contemporanea, El Consejeria de Cultura y Deportes

Comunidad de Madrid, Madrid, Spain Mixed up Childhood, Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand My So Called Life, Monte Clark Gallery, Toronto, Canada Buenos Aires 7th Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente, Argentina Kunst Film Biennale, Cologne, Germany Observetori 2005, Museo de las Artes, Valencia, Spain Narratives of the Presumed Invisible, Kunsthalle Lophem, Lophem, Belgium 2004 Nocturnal Emissions, The Groninger Museum, Groninger, The Netherlands Ditto: Multiples From the Collection, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL The Amazing and the Immutable, University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL ME, MYSELF, & I Photographs, University Galleries, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL 19

WILL BOYS BE BOYS? Questioning Adolescent Masculinity in Contemporary Art,

Independent Curators International, NYC Excess: Food as Metaphor and other Strategies of Consumption, Fine Arts Center Galleries,

University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI Out of Place: Part II, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis, IN Is One Thing Better Than Another, Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Cologne, Germany PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC

The Museum of Modern Art, NYC

The Guggenheim Museum of Art, NYC

The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY

21C Museum, Louisville, KY

Telfair Museum, Savannah, GA

North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC

Arizona State University Art Museum, AZ

The Museum of Helmond, The Netherlands

The Groninger Museum, Groninger, The Netherlands

Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL

Yale University Art Collection, Photography, CT

El Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla, Leon, Spain

The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithica, NY

University of Georgia Library, Rare Books Collection, Athens, GA

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC

The Indianapolis Museum, Indianapolis, IN

The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

Centro Galego De Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

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