On view at The Contemporary Austin – Laguna Gloria
Trained as a filmmaker, Texas–based artist Nic Nicosia (American, born 1951 in Dallas, Texas) has long incorporated play and the surreal into cinematic, photographic images and moving pictures. Nicosia emerged onto the contemporary art scene in the early 1980s along with the rise of the Pictures Generation: artists appropriating imagery from popular culture and media. Over the past decade the artist has increasingly turned to sculpture, bringing the figures of his photographs into three-dimensional space. Referencing photographs and smaller-scale sculpture originally created in 2011, a new sculptural commission in stainless steel, the twins, 2018, is both an exploration and celebration of the fragility of the human psyche. A study in introspection inspired by both personal and universal emotional experiences, here the artist’s rendering of two dysmorphic, humanoid figures point toward the unknown.