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PRESS RELEASE
Nic Nicosia
Untitled
May 16 through June 14, 2003
Dunn and Brown Contemporary is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Nic Nicosia. The opening of the exhibition will take place on Friday, May 16 from 6 p.m. until 8 p.m. The artist will be present for the opening, and the exhibition will continue through Saturday, June 14.
The exhibition is comprised of a series of ten photographs and one motion picture. As with previous work, Nicosia’s powerful images challenge the viewer to discern what is real and what is staged for the camera. In one photograph, a mannequin appears to harness a boy who floats among the stars, escaping the constraints of gravity. In another photograph, the line between fiction and reality continues to blur with the image of a meticulously manicured hedge maze that appears to reside within the confines of a house.
Nicosia refers to these intense visual images as "unedited thoughts." In a stream-of-conscious manner, Nicosia executes the compositions as he first imagines them. Unlike Nicosia’s staged photographs from the past in which the artist worked with various casts and characters modifying and altering the ideas for a finished work, Nicosia keeps his initial vision for a composition in the purest form possible with as few alterations as possible. In fact, many of the images in this series were the first thoughts of the artist just after awakening from a night’s sleep. Perhaps the purity and freshness of these images contributes to the strong dream-like quality of the series.
Nicosia’s motion picture, SaFe @ 360°, shot with digital video on DVD, depicts the landscape between Dallas, Texas and Sante Fe, New Mexico. Once again forgoing the traditional notions of photography as a means of capturing reality, Nicosia photographed panoramic highway views and then painstakingly reconstructed them in miniature. The resulting film depicts the recreated set; another of Nicosia’s astounding optic manipulations.
Within the past year, Nicosia has had one-person exhibitions at SITE Santa Fe, the Ulrich Museum of Art, and CASA in Salamanca, Spain. He has the distinction of being included in two Whitney Biennial Exhibitions in 1983 and 2000. Furthermore, Nicosia has garnered national attention through his inclusion in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Cocoran Gallery of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. In addition to exhibiting in Documenta IX, Nicosia has exhibited extensively through out Europe in such venues as the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Kunstverein Museum in Munich, and Groninger Museum in The Netherlands. His photographs and films 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.
Please contact Elizabeth Phy at the gallery for more information or to request visuals. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. until 5 p.m. and by appointment.