Indepth Arts News:
"Nic Nicosia: Real Pictures 1979-1999"
2000-12-09 until 2001-02-04
Austin Museum of Art
Austin, TX,
USA
The Austin Museum of Art (AMOA), in collaboration with the Texas Fine
Arts Association (TFAA), will present Nic Nicosia: Real Pictures 1979-1999, the
first retrospective of this Dallas-based artists career. Featuring more than
fifty photographs, three video/film works, and a video installation, the
exhibition will be the first comprehensive look at the work of this leading
Texas artist to be seen in Central Texas. AMOA and TFAA are located within
walking distance of each other on Congress Avenue, AMOA at 823 Congress and TFAA
at 700 Congress.
Nic Nicosia: Real Pictures 1979-1999 traces this internationally known artistNULLs
fascination with the gap between illusion and reality, especially as played out
in middle-class American suburbia. Nicosia uses the paradoxically intimate and
mundane settings of the bedroom, kitchen, or backyard as the back-drop for his
photographs, but alters them by introducing obviously artificial conventions
from movies and television. While he treats the subjects of his colorful
narratives and character studies with affectionate humor, Nicosia also reveals
darker realities of desire, violence, and isolation that lie beneath the surface
of his artificial worlds. Nevertheless, he avoids passing judgment on his
troupe of characters, leaving viewers to reach their own conclusions about the
values and personas encountered in his works.
ADD ONE / AMOA AND TFAA PRESENT NIC NICOSIA: REAL PICTURES 1979-1999
Nic Nicosia (b. 1951) first attracted national acclaim in the early 1980s for
his set-up
color photographs in which hand-crafted tableaux, playfully activated by friends
and
family actors, blurred the definition of the photographers role both before
and behind the camera. His early images explored everyday dramas of family life
and adult activities in rich, saturated color. Nicosias subsequent work in
black and white was moodier and more passionate, tackling the tensions of
adolescence, the complexities of young adulthood, and the frustration of
middle-age parenthood, with penetrating honesty.
By the mid-1990s, the work had become surreal, and completely manipulated,
through the use of dramatic costumes and make-up. A new stage in the artists
career is marked by his recent move into film and video, in which the suburban
neighborhood and all its quirky characters come alive on the screen. His
award-winning films have been shown in festivals internationally and one of his
films, Middletown Morning, was featured in the 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the
Whitney Museum of American Art.
Nicosias work has been featured in major international exhibitions including
Documenta IX at the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany and Pleasures and
Terrors of Domestic Comfort at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. His
photographs and videos are in the permanent collections of MoMA; the Whitney
Museum of American Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Nic Nicosia: Real Pictures 1979-1999 has been organized by the Contemporary Arts
Museum, Houston and co-curated by Austin Museum of Art Chief Curator Dana
Friis-Hansen and Contemporary Arts Museum Senior Curator Lynn M. Herbert.
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