Santa Monica

Young Texas photographer Nic Nicosia was trained as a film maker. Now, he invents and photographs scenarios in which people, props and sets pantomime social situations. There was always a bit of tomfoolery to past work and Nicosia was sure to let us in on the gag, showing the strings that held up props and exaggerating drama to the level of cliche. Marital tension came in the form of an estranged couple in front of the enlarged blueprint for a house; gratuitous violence came in a staged shot of a polite wine-and-cheese party where a suited guest hauled off and punched another tidy guest.

If old works were situation comedies, new works are film noir . Nicosia works in black-and-white, stressing the camera’s knack for blurring distinctions between the contrived and the real. There are no more obvious clues of the artist’s efforts at staging shots. These are taken outdoors, in natural settings that are so believable we question whether Nicosia has suddenly switched to a candid, slice-of-life technique.

A majestic granite wall rises above a shallow stream. In the foreground is a man waving back a group of gawking children pressing to see a body floating face down. In another long shot of a bucolic park, we zero in on the humiliated, enraged figure of a little boy tormented by his friends. A brilliant work taken from an upstairs window captures a speeding car whose passenger vaults a bottle at a street-corner clown who responds with an obscene hand gesture.

Aptly and punningly called “Real Pictures,” Nicosia’s chilling fictions tap our absolutely real attraction for the dangerous and prurient in life. (Linda Cathcart Gallery, 924 Colorado Ave., to Feb. 17.)