source: utpressutexasedu

Photographer and filmmaker Nic Nicosia makes pictures. Since the late 1970s, Nicosia has staged and constructed sets, objects, and situations to be photographed rather than to reproduce something that already exists. These conceptual fabrications have ranged from elaborate sets with live actors to dioramas and abstract constructions. Whether his pictures contain a disturbing suburban narrative, or are fabricated by the act of drawing, or are simply created by the use of common objects with dramatic lighting, the familiar thread of Nicosia’s unique vision and sensibility is always present.
Nic Nicosia is the first major publication of the artist’s work and covers his entire oeuvre through 2011. The catalog presents images from all of Nicosia’s major photographic series, including Domestic Dramas, Near (modern) Disasters, The Cast, Life as We Know It, Real Pictures, Love + Lust, Acts, Sex Acts, Untitled Landscapes, 365 SaFe Days, Untitled (drawing), Space Time Light, I See Light, and in the absence of others, as well as stills from the videos Middletown, Moving Picture, Middletown Morning, Cerchi E Quadratti, On Acting America, and 9 1/2 Hours to SaFe. Accompanying the catalog is an overview of Nicosia’s career by Michelle White, an interview with the artist by Sue Graze, and an original short story by Philipp Meyer that powerfully resonates with the sense of wonder and menace in Nicosia’s art.
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source: gforg

Nic Nicosia was born in 1951 in Dallas, Texas. He currently lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In 1974 Nic received a B.S. in Radio-TV-Film from the University of North Texas with a concentration in motion pictures. Working as a conceptual artist who uses a camera, Nic subsequently applied his cinematic mindset to the making of a still image. He fabricates and stages situations and events to be photographed and is recognized as a pioneer of the staged photographic movement that came into prominence in the early1980s.

Nic Nicosia’s first solo show in New York City was at Artists Space in 1982, followed by his work being included in the 1983 Whitney Biennial, and New Perspectives in American Art: 1983 Exxon National Exhibition at the Guggenheim. He has been included in several biennials, including Documenta IX in 1992, and a second Whitney Biennial in 2000. His work has been shown regularly in solo and important group exhibitions throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. In 1999 the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston launched a retrospective of his work, Nic Nicosia, Real Pictures 1979-1999, which traveled to several venues. Another major survey of his work was exhibited at CASA in Salamanca, Spain, in 2003.

Museums that have acquired Nic’s work for their permanent collections include The Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, The Los Angeles County Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, The High Museum, Atlanta, and the Walker Art Center, to mention a few.

In addition to his 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, Nic Nicosia received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant in 1984, Awards in the Visual Arts – AVA 11 in 1991, and The Tesuque Foundation Artist Fellowship Grant in 1998.