HCP´s Main Gallery features Anthony Goicolea´s Related, a web of personal narratives about the Cuban-American´s familial, religious, and cultural heritage. The artist strings together a complex series of dialectics denoting his experience of cultural dislocation, assimilation, and desire to maintain ancestral histories.

HCP´s Main Gallery features Anthony Goicolea´s Related, a web of personal narratives about the Cuban-American´s familial, religious, and cultural heritage. The artist strings together a complex series of dialectics denoting his experience of cultural dislocation, assimilation, and desire to maintain ancestral histories.

A relatively affluent Catholic family struggling to live freely within a burgeoning Communist regime, the Goicoleas fled Cuba for the southern U.S. in 1961 following the Bay of Pigs Invasion. While they maintained a continuity of Cuban traditions, partial assimilation into North American culture naturally ensued. What tangible evidence remains of the Goicoleas period in Cuba are a few keepsakes, including vernacular studio portrait images taken prior to 1961. These photographs depict four generations of the artist´s maternal and paternal ancestors wearing their Sunday best.

The studio portraits serve as Goicolea´s initial source material to meditate on his lineage. Producing several generations of imagery from these portraits, he metaphorically builds generations of meaning. Beginning with his drawings and paintings of the appropriated studio photographs in negative opposite, Goicolea moves beyond traditional boundaries of photography and notions of authorship. His apparitional images transcribed solely by sight are reminiscent of early Daguerreotype portraits and analog photographic processes.

Goicolea then creates photographs of these negative drawings, re-enlivening his ancestors by dually reversing them from negative to positive, left to right. Nailing these photographs on telephone poles and trees amidst his family´s adopted environs in the U.S., Goicolea evokes ideas of cultural dislocation. These environmental portraits take form as wanted ads or missing posters as well as introduce the idea of martyrdom.

In 2008, Anthony Goicolea was the first of his relatives to visit Cuba following their 1961 departure. Navigating his ancestral homeland using rough maps drawn by his family, Goicolea renders Cuban landmarks in various stages of decay to suggest architecture of the past or metaphysical constructions.

Related is Goicolea´s real and imagined vision of his personal history. Complex and nostalgic, it invites us to unearth a series of metaphors, ancestral references, and constructed mythologies embedded within each layer of the media about a Cuban-American experience.

This exhibition is curated by Madeline Yale, HCP´s Adjunct Curator and former Executive Director/Curator from 2006-9. The exhibition is generously supported by Southern Union, Co. and the Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation.


ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Anthony Goicolea (b. 1971) is a first generation Cuban-American artist living in Brooklyn, NY who works in photography, video, sculpture and drawing. He became internationally known for his complex, staged tableaux of pre-pubescent boys, which featured multiples of the artist himself. Following his self-portrait work, the artist created constructed landscapes, which led to the series Sheltered and Almost Safe, the latter of which was featured in HCP´s spot magazine in 2007. Goicolea´s work has been in numerous solo and group exhibitions at institutions including the Guggenheim (New York, NY — forthcoming in March, 2010), Brooklyn Museum of Art (Brooklyn, NY), Mass MoCA (North Adams, MA), The Groninger Museum (The Netherlands), the Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne, Australia) The Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL), and the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2005, he received the BMW-Paris Photo Award for Photography. Goicolea´s third monograph, Fictions, debuted by Twin Palms/Twelve Trees Press in 2009. He is represented by Postmasters Gallery (New York, NY), Haunch of Venison (London, UK) and Aurel Scheibler, (Berlin, DE).