Superstition, in our racy, analytical, knowledge-based world, is commonly defined as an irrational belief arising from ignorance or fear. The folklorist Jan Brunvand more substantively-and less ignorantly-proposes "superstitions involve beliefs, practices, and procedures based upon conscious or unconscious assumptions, usually concerned with the nature of cause and effect." More broadly the sly bastard is suggesting we are all, despite the trappings of advanced science and technology, our secular structure of government and society and a healthy, Western disregard for cute, provincial hocus pocus, addicted to the idea of magic. We may have three-piece suits and nuclear power and mapped genomes and vat-grown cyborg hearts but on a personal level, we spend a lot of time on our metaphorical knees squinting at the lay of bones in the dirt and angling for mysterious blessings.
The funny part is, we keep it largely hidden; we accommodate astrology and gambling, but if I feel following the same route to work each day with no deviation will result in a
raise next month, I'm likely to keep that information to myself. As much as our mainstream entertainment apparatus fantasizes about magic, our personal sensibilities about what manipulates the world beyond the perceptibly real are kept close and private and hard to find.
Nic Nicosia's collection of manipulated photographic landscapes, for example, refuse to come right out with it. The first hurdle to overcome in negotiating Nicosia's work is to find it. James Kelly Contemporary has had to leave its digs across from SITE Santa Fe for the time being and relocate (616 1/2 Canyon Road, 989-1601) to a new building, which sacrifices a touch of the old space's boho cred, but makes up for it in swank, straightforward chic. On the wall then are Nicosia's good-sized archival ink jet prints on thick watercolor paper. Reading instantly as large, color saturated landscapes the work is first bland; second off-kilter, fake and disturbing; third sloppy and theatrical; and fourth…deeply personal and filled with emotion and more than a little bit of pure mojo.
In the course of a long (and lengthening) history of projects in Santa Fe, Nicosia's commute from Dallas transformed into an extended meditation on whether he ought to move to Santa Fe permanently. His travels through Texas and New Mexico inspired a film project and the landscapes on display at James Kelly are, first and foremost, storyboard illustrations and conceptual waypoints for that film. But further down the meat of the imagery, they become internal debates and superstitious prayers about where a person belongs and what the soul longs to wrench from the options thrust before it each day.
So, how does a tweaked photograph progress from bland to soul-stirring, from inflexible, theoretical study to emotive philosophical meandering? Nicosia leads the viewer with a series of questions. Confronting people with, say, a cut-out house situated over a highway with the very cliché of Western landscape disappearing beyond, and an initial query of "who cares?" is risky. But once the decision has been made to take a closer look, the artist has separated (for his purposes) the wheat from the chaff is ready to entertain more pointed inquiries. Why, one next wonders, when an artist has all the technology available in the world to seamlessly fuse the body of a house, windows and roofline and all, into the rocky terrain of a desert road, does he choose to drop it roughly onto the scene, more like a child's collage than a finished project? Because, answers the monolithic gaze of Nicosia's landscape, it's too easy otherwise, too expected. No one here is making a magazine advertisement. In fact, the simulated textures of movie special effects, the video game realism of television or a walk through downtown New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Berlin, London are now absolutely real to the extent that the surreal blending of objects is no longer eye catching, no longer of interest. The artfully false has become the predominant visual fabric, thus the cartoony collision of two worlds, the patchwork, slapped together approach is the only way to ask serious questions about the chasm between real and perceived, between where we want to be and where we are, between doldrums and magic.
With this neat trick, Nicosia manages to use the smudged, dirty mountains of his imagination, the too symmetrical clouds of his peripheral vision, the inverted billboard of backyard irony-all things that are perfectly fake-in the service of destroying artifice. In his plastic, frumpy make believe, Nicosia examines his own desires, chases the tail of meaning and belonging and infuses images in danger of over-analysis with an anti-academic, rubbery melange of symbols, possibilities and thick, thick hoo doo superstition.
