FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Nic Nicosia

October 7 - 30, 2004

Charles Cowles Gallery is pleased to present our first exhibition of NIC NICOSIA's work.  This exhibition includes Untitled 2002, a series of ten large-scale still photographs, which NICOSIA refers to as unedited thoughts.  In a stream-of-conscious manner, he executed these vivid compositions as he first imagined them.  Unlike NICOSIA's staged photographs from the 1980s and early 1990s in which the artist directed various casts and characters through a series of altered sets before creating a finished composition, NICOSIA  keeps his initial vision for these photographs in the purest form possible.  In fact, many of the images in this series were the first thoughts of the artist just after awakening from a nights sleep.  This direct approach yields intense dream-like works that transport the viewer into NICOSIA's altered worlds.

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 faceless woman appears to harness a young boy who flies among the stars, escaping the constraints of gravity.  In another photograph, the line between fiction and reality is blurred further as a man and woman separately wander within a maze of landscaped hedges with no exit point.  Vivid in both detail and color, these works pull the viewer into their larger-than-life realities.

In addition to the Untitled 2002 series, this exhibition includes a group of Untitled Landscapes from 2003-2004.  Over the past several years, NICOSIA has become intrigued by the hypnotic drive that he has taken countless times between Dallas, TX and Santa Fe, NM.  Over the coarse of this ten-hour drive through Central and West Texas and into New Mexico, the ever-changing dramatic landscape (and skyscape) has become inspiration for the artist.  Not only was it the subject of these altered still photographs, this mesmerizing road trip has served as the subject of a 9½ hour film project recently completed by NICOSIA.

NICOSIA had recent one-person exhibitions at SITE Santa Fe, the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University, Kansas, and CASA in Salamanca, Spain.  He has been included in two Whitney Biennial exhibitions in 1983 and 2000, and Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany. NICOSIA has garnered international attention through his inclusion in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; Baltimore Museum of Art; Centre Georges Pompidou; Kunstverein Museum, Munich; and Groninger Museum, The Netherlands.  His photographs and films are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston among others.

The exhibition will be on view at the Charles Cowles Gallery at 537 West 24^th Street, between 10^th and 11^th Avenues in Chelsea.  Hours are 10am to 6pm, Tuesday through Saturday.  The reception for the artist is on Thursday, October 7, from 6 to 8 pm. 

Above image: Untitled 2002 #10, 2002, archival inkjet on Somerset watercolor paper, 36 x 48