| “Almost Safe,” an exhibition by Anthony Giocolea, examines a post-apocalyptic world redolent with anxiety, nostalgia and a futuristic science fiction quality. The exhibition consists of six large format black and white digital photographs, drawings alluding to 19th century portraiture, a painting and a 75-second, 16-millimeter film. The artist, Photoshop whiz and master choreographer, travels the globe collecting images that he recombines digitally to create barely plausible, fantastic urban wastelands and sites of industrial decay. His dreamlike landscapes have a curious stillness and are mostly depopulated in favor of the drama created by cumulous clouds swirling above in the distant sky, reminiscent of 19th century romantic landscape paintings, whose mandate was to portray the sublime. |  |
Almost Safe – E.K. Clark
“Almost Safe,” an exhibition by Anthony Giocolea, examines a post-apocalyptic world redolent with anxiety, nostalgia and a futuristic science fiction quality. The exhibition consists of six large format black and white digital photographs, drawings alluding to 19th century portraiture, a painting and a 75-second, 16-millimeter film.
The artist, Photoshop whiz and master choreographer, travels the globe collecting images that he recombines digitally to create barely plausible, fantastic urban wastelands and sites of industrial decay. His dreamlike landscapes have a curious stillness and are mostly depopulated in favor of the drama created by cumulous clouds swirling above in the distant sky, reminiscent of 19th century romantic landscape paintings, whose mandate was to portray the sublime.
Consider, for example, Deconstruction. Here is a shell of a building (apparently ready for demolition), but, upon closer inspection, the picture reveals a startling sight. There, in the individual spaces that used to be living quarters, hang hammocks filled with elderly people. It’s a nightmare scenario. What are they doing there? Are they sleeping? Are they being warehoused and waiting to die? Is this the artist’s critique on American attitudes toward the elderly, or a perverse reversal of the film Lord of the Flies (in which a group of adolescents are transformed into predators)? The artist successfully undermines our grasp on the reality we know by juxtaposing it with an unimaginable scenario. The desolate wasteland in the foreground and the turbulent sky above further aggravate the imminent threat predicating a sci-fi, barely habitable and futuristic world.
Low Tide is an image that could easily have come out of a Hitchcock film like The Birds. In a more perfect, ideal world, this picture of the ocean at low tide with the grand vista of cavernous rocks framing the water could have been the subject of a romantic 19th century painting. Instead, Goicolea challenges our expectations about beauty and the picturesque, by portraying a grotesque mise en scène of disorder, pollution and decay. In the foreground, a mass of fish floats on the surface of the bilious water, more dead than alive. In the background, hundreds of black birds congregate on a maze of electric wires against the backdrop of a menacing sky. Ironically, an isolated figure sits on a bench, taking in the view. The artist inserts other discordant elements such as a water tower, an electric light pole and what looks like an oil well. Nothing makes sense anymore.
In the photograph Black Ice, Giocolea features the metaphor of a dysfunctional world in another seascape. Oil wells and abandoned industrial buildings appear in the distant mist while icebergs float in the sea nearby. A man sits in a car with Greenland plates observing a graffitied wall and ruins, covered in pristine snow. This bleak picture with such an alienated voyeur might be amusing if it were not so deeply disturbing. In contrast, North Bank portrays the architecture of an industrial site as a winter wonderland from the point of view of a Soviet Cold War propaganda poster, but in a post-industrial world.
In Smoke Stacks, hundreds of smoke stacks spew pollution into the Parisian sky, seen from above tile roofs, and marring the picturesque charm of this city so well known for its elegance. Here, Paris turns to hellish nightmare.
In Search Party, a nostalgic throwback to another era and the only painting in color, the artist calls up a bizarre occurrence. Three men wearing masks in a hot air balloons attempt to rescue someone. As they hover over the village of old fashioned wooden houses, a number of discordant elements catch our attention: oil-wells, a helicopter flying overhead, a tangle of electric wires, water towers and the only living tree. Even this quaint village hasn’t escaped the discord and pestilence of the larger world. Putting together discordant cultural fragments, the artist presents a surreal, disturbing portrait of disorder and a pathology of social malaise.
