Stolen Youth
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday October 17, 2003
Why use uncooperative kids in your shoots when you can clone yourself? DOMINIQUE ANGELORO reports.
Looking at New York artist Anthony Goicolea's images is a little like looking at tween twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen at play. There are identical-looking preppy
pre-pubescent kids engaged in a series of oddball scenarios, the images stirring memories of adolescent anxieties we might rather forget. It's the stuff of first dates, school camps, detention and physical education.
It might be all fun, games and canned laughter for the squeaky clean Olsen twins, but Goicolea's scenes bring a touch of Village of the Damned to the Sweet Valley High picnic. The artist nurtures an uneasy mix of humour and horror under the veneer of wide eyes and knee-high socks.
In fact, the doubles in his images are not twins at all, but rather the result of seamless digital trickery. He multiplies the identical figures up to a dozen times in a single photograph, creating an army of cloned rascals.
To add to the weirdness, it's Goicolea in the images. The 32-year-old artist pulls a Peter Pan, employing his boyish looks, some clever make-up and costuming to transform himself into the youthful clones.
Goicolea's Sydney solo exhibition contains a variety of photographs and videos. In Double Dare 2002, two identical and trouserless boys sit in the snow with their tongues frozen to a Hills hoist. Elsewhere in works from the Summer Camp Series (2000), two meticulously dressed youths lie about leisurely in a wheelbarrow and in a row boat wedged ashore.
Perhaps because the cloned kids exist in solitude, a sexual tension seems to lurk between the identical adolescents.
It's like an Adam and Eve play of narcissistic adolescent sexuality.
In Goicolea's video pieces, he imbues his digital Mini-Mes with movement. A constant stream of giggling clones can be seen tumbling down a flight of stairs in Tickle 2002. They appear to be stuck in a perpetual loop of falling from which they cannot escape.
Goicolea's twisted self-portraits are his signature works, but he has departed from that subject matter in recent pieces.
His image is absent from a series of moody landscape photographs, which include a breathtaking image of a large glacier with carved steps leading to an ominous void. Goicolea's obsession with repetition is still evident in these images, but it now involves the multiplication of aspects of the environment, animals and man-made structures.
In the spirit of multiplicity, the Gow Langsford Gallery is one of nine galleries under one roof at the Danks Street art depot. It's the perfect one-stop art crawl, caffeine included.
ANTHONY GOICOLEA
Where Gow Langsford Gallery, 2 Danks Street, Waterloo
When Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-6pm, until October 28
More information 9699 1279
© 2003 Sydney Morning Herald