Anthony Goicolea "Pathetic Fallacy"
Postmasters Gallery
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Postmasters presents Pathetic Fallacy, an exhibition of new drawings and photographs by ANTHONY GOICOLEA. This will be the artist's fourth solo show at the gallery. Central to the exhibition is a forty-foot long wall of layered drawings, large and small, rendered in graphite and ink on mylar.
The term “pathetic fallacy,” coined by John Ruskin in Modern Painters (1856), describes the treatment of inanimate objects and places as if they had human feelings, thoughts, orsensations.
In this new group of photographs and drawings nature takeson anthropomorphic characteristics. A new, uneasy equilibriumis created as human and animal bodies merge, trees growhair and pump blood, flies multiply into tornadoes and wild dogs settle in the ruins of a home. Anthony Goicolea’s versionof pathetic fallacy becomes anatmospheric elegy of passing time,transition, loss and decay. In newhybridized world of man and nature nothing is permanent andnothing is safe. Humans, plantsand animals have cross-pollinated;they have merged, evolved andadopted different features fromeach other. Objects acquirepathos and empathy while thedecomposition of material thingsreflects the the world in flux.
Oftentimes we celebrate life with beautified images, but Goicolea portrays life as a riot oforganic forms, each grasping for light and air with an almost violent greed. Nature iseconomical in the structures it uses: vascular forms repeat in bundles of nerves, blood vessels and rivers when seen from above. In his drawings Giocolea superimposes theseforms, transitioning from one to the other in a seamless manner that casts an unflinching eye on anatomy.
Goicolea practices a nominal realism in his photography, but each scene gathers farflungelements that generate subtle cognitive dissonances. As signs, these images generate a primary emotion, often sadness, loneliness or a sense of a lost past, but underneath them is a geographic surrealism,a nagging impression that these places do not really exist. Or that they exist in many places, though perhaps only in the imagination.
Media
Schedule
from September 10, 2011 to October 15, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-09-10 from 18:00 to 20:00