Grim American Portraits Grace Cleveland Exhibit

Love and Death in Suburbia: Nic Nicosia's Art

Nic Nicosia is a miner of our cultural mileau, unearthing in his unsettling photography the anxieties and isolations of the American suburb. His new retrospective at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Nic Nicosia: Real Pictures 1979-1999, presents a unique opportunity to witness his artistic development.

Coming of age photographically in the late '70s and early '80s, Nicosia experienced the radical shift away from the older, Ansel Adams-style conception of the photo as a true document of reality toward a more artificial, stylized photography. His early work reflects the influence.

The 1982 sequence Domestic Dramas sets scenes of family disorder ‹ unruly children drawing on walls, extramarital desire for the office secretary ‹ against a cartoonish, flat backdrop. In "Domestic Drama #3" a couple engages in heated argument over their planned dream house while standing on a giant freehand blueprint. An architect, bricklayer and painter inhabit the fringes of the composition, while in the foreground a daughter looks back at her distraught parents. The garish, posed flatness of these pictures present a pop-ish dreamscape which is both humorous and unnerving, filled as it is with looks of anger, apathy, and disquietude.

Nicosia's next sequence, 1983's Near (modern) Disasters, continues in a similar vein. Figures are spread across the photographs in unbalanced positions, at the whim of various disastrous circumstances. In "Near (modern) Disaster #8," a woman clutches at a Œno parking' sign which is bent backward by the force of an (imagined) hurricane. Meanwhile other figures struggle against the wind on foot. It is the serene artificiality of the composition which is intriguing: the white PVC railing, the Dali-like painted beach and clouds in the background. Number two in the series presents clownish, chic figures at an art exhibition, contorted to avoid the line of a laser beam which bounces around the room. In the corner stands the laser's devious operator, controlling the toy-like laser via remote control.

There is no attempt made in these images to hide the artifice of their creation. Architecture is reduced to an abstracted minimum, and human bodies assume the formal incongruencies of architecture. It is not insignificant that the title of the exhibition is "Real Pictures." Yet Nicosia's dichotomy is not that of reality and illusion, but rather of the real and the synthetic.

Nicosia's subjects looks as if they spent a season living in the detritus of architectural high-modernism, and came out on the other side. It is a sensitive and difficult terrain, mapped with care and humor.

The later works featured in the show exhibit a marked change in Nicosia's stylistic direction. The bright color and self-consciousness of his previous offerings give way to darker black-and-white prints. His surrealism is no longer all-encompassing, but rather paired down to a central subject, as when a father and daughter discover a fire at their front door ("Real Pictures #19"), or children fish over a river, a plastic doll fixed to the end of the line (#15).

The sequence Love + Lust (1990-91) explores themes of voyeurism and isolation through bedroom locales. Nicosia's subjects wear estranged expressions and are often partially absent from the composition, giving rise to stark emotional and erotic distances.

The final sequence in the exhibition, Acts 1-9, is perhaps the most affecting. Whereas before Nicosia's subjects bore a clownish emotionality, in Acts the faces have a studied, noirish blankness. They become the site for a mysterious projection on the part of the viewer (as in "Act Nine," where Nicosia portrays himself as an old man) which is haunting in its resonances.

Ultimately the later work presents a paring-down and condensation of Nicosia's earlier motifs, not a rejection of them. They are rife with a kafkaesque laughter in the dark. But here Nicosia's continued residence in suburban Dallas is instructive: like Kafka, he is laughing with, not at, his subjects. Even while exploring the crumbling interior of the American Dream, he refuses to explicitly condemn it. As such, Nicosia's creations have a deep undercurrent of human empathy ‹ one which lodges in the viewer and refuses to be moved.

Nic Nicosia: Real Pictures 1979-1999 runs through November 15th at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art. (8501 Carnegie Ave. tel: 216/421-8771)

Lauren Maurand contributed to this article.