He traded Pegasus for piñon wood and got a bobcat or two in the deal. Artist Nic Nicosia — master of precise photographs that explore “the myth of perfection still alive in America’s suburbs,” theorizes Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography, where his work hangs — has gone fully Santa Fe. Six years ago, he and wife Becky left Dallas for the desert town, first renting the historic house of none other than designer Alexander Girard. Two moves later, they own a house on five acres, complete with an high-ceilinged garage that “makes for a very nice studio,” Nicosia says, and a workroom across an interior courtyard where Becky crafts jewelry. What else came with the digs? Views of the Jemez mountains and a few wild neighbors: “coyotes, jackrabbits, deer, an occasional bobcat and innumerable species of birds.” Nicosia is in the studio daily and has just finished a new series, I See Light. “Now I am forming the criteria for a new one,” he reports. (We can’t wait.) But in the meantime, he has started making “staged and fabricated family portraits, which has been a lot of fun with young families here.” On his I-miss-Dallas list? Daughters, family, good friends, flat streets for bike riding and Dunn and Brown Contemporary, where he is represented. All that is somewhat assuaged, though, by seeing Santa Feans in “funny hats,” says Nicosia, the kind one “could never get away with in a city such as Dallas.”

 

Photo: Nic Nicosia at home in Santa Fe, photographed by Nan Coulter