James Kelly Contemporary is pleased to present In the Absence of Others, an exhibition of new photographs and sculpture by Nic Nicosia. This will be Nicosia’s third show at the gallery.

The show will consist of approximately sixteen new black and white photographs of varying sizes and an installation of small figurative sculptures.

Nicosia grew up in Dallas, Texas, and moved to Santa Fe in 2004. His early training as a filmmaker enhanced his understanding of creating a narrative with a movie camera and allowed him to take this skill and apply it to still photography. He emerged in the early 1980s with a series of lens-based works that employed the use of the narrative by telling an entire story with one image. Nicosia used various methods to illustrate the story by building elaborate sets, painted backdrops, and stylized costumes, to create and photograph scenes that are deliberately artificial. This method of creating an image by constructing an artificial reality quickly became Nicosia’s trademark.

(text source: James Kelly Contemporary)

(Image: Nic Nicosia, and the ego goes where, 2010, Archival Inkjet on Somerset Watercolor Paper, 40 x 27 inches; Courtesy of the artist and James Kelly Contemporary)

More about Nic Nicosia (b. 1951, Dallas, Texas)

Nic Nicosia is an internationally known artist who has a 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.

(text source: West Collection)

Education:  B. A. (Radio, TV, Film), University of North Texas, Denton, 1974.

Further information here...(ArtSlant Profile) (Artist's Website) (Galleries: James Kelly Contemporary,  Talley Dunn Gallery)

(Image on top: Nic Nicosia, mouth to mind, 2011, Archival Inkjet on Somerset Watercolor Paper, 15 x 16 inches unframed; Courtesy of the artist and James Kelly Contemporary)