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Anthony Goicolea’s recent exhibition of photographs departs from his previous focus on group portraiture and self-portraiture to take the landscape as its primary subject. But nothing in this digital trickster’s world is quite so simple as that. His ‘groups’ are replications of himself – or some younger or ambiguously gendered version of himself – in a variety of environments whence the characters take their cue. Whether as Catholic prep-school boys toying with the accoutrements of holy rituals (or each other) or as a band of cannibalistic or marauding teens that provide a postmodern, suburban rendition of Lord of the Flies, this pretty actor is well suited to the diverse starring roles in which he casts his bizarre, adolescent alter-egos.

In this recent body of work, these younger selves populate three short videos and an extraordinarily long photograph (some 288 by 10.5 inches). Classroom shows two school boys in back row desks, one snatching nervous glances at his doppelgänger, who progressively, absent-mindedly pulls out all his platinum hair – before fastening pieces of chalk to his fingers and attacking the background blackboard with a frenzy. Another, shot in the eerie greenish light of night vision goggles, presents a skittish boy sitting awake in bed chewing his fingernails. Covered in a gooey soup of hundreds of these shiny, larva-like chewings, the obsessive Nail Biter of this disgusting drama is like a salivating animal discovered in his secret lair. Tickle shows a boy – or rather boy after identical boy – tumbling down a staircase; the instigating tickler is missing from this peculiar clip, which ends with the boy flailing at the base of the staircase, his clothes pulsating frenetically to the movements of some sadistic poltergeist. If this sounds awfully weird, it is, and wonderfully disturbing, too, in a Clockwork Orange sort of way.





Snowscape, perhaps the pièce de resistance of the exhibition, is the aforementioned hyper-horizontal photograph, and the only one in which Goicolea’s multiple surrogate selves appear; it therefore seems a transitional work that bridges the earlier Multiple Self-Portrait Series with the more recent landscapes. Three flat wintry expanses meld into each other to hint with restraint at a narrative in keeping with the artist’s established themes. A group of semi-clad figures lie as though sleeping in the snow, a yellow patch marking this as their collective campsite; some distance across a snowy expanse, miscellaneous pelts hang on a spindly contraption as though to dry; still further, snowballs are stacked like cannonballs in pyramidal forms; another vast, more rocky expanse passes, and the photograph ends with a glacial cave. The near seamless technical proficiency with which Goicolea’s scenes, whether video or photographic, are constructed is remarkable. It is not that you can’t see that cuts and pastes were made (and sometimes where), but rather that the fetishistic fixation upon detail, and the interest of whatever ‘tale of the semi-nude tundra snowball hunters’ is intended, distracts from the realisation that the same mountain range reappears time and again on the distant horizon. The landscapes are no less simulacral and synthetic than the self-portraits, and hardly less strange.





In many of the landscapes, the Goicolea alter egos are replaced by members of the animal kingdom. A ménage à trois of two stags and a doe in one forest is complemented by a trio with one stag whose antlers are moulting in another, the trees of which are wrapped in toilet paper (a high-school prank-as-mating-ritual in some North American regions). In Half-Pipe, birds mimic the activity of skateboarders. And in the best of these images, the pastoral Cherry Island, an infestation of ducks, doves, roosters and rabbits on a well manicured little island make for a sickly-sweet feathered and furry garden party. Goicolea may have departed from his focus on adolescent male anxieties, but his fantastical perversion remains happily intact.

Joe Hill

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