NADA Miami 2023

Joe Mama-Nitzberg adopts and adapts found images from “high” and “low” culture, “mainstream” and “sub-” culture, and images of the famous and the anonymous. The affectively layered works presented at NADA Miami confront loss (from the AIDS epidemic especially), nostalgia, semiotic literacy, technology, and identity with the artist’s trademark sense of humor. Each pairs source imagery—from After Dark magazine; of Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, and their audiences; of key works from the history of photography and conceptual art—with found or composed texts in strategies drawn from the Pictures Generation and their forebears. These pictures draw on deep respect for their subjects and a lifetime of consideration of their importance while acknowledging knotty feelings about fame, representation, tragedy, aging, and cultural obsolescence.

“You might know this phrase/hashtag from social media. You might also notice ‘images with beds in them.’ You might also recognize who Brenda Frazier or Marcel Proust or Félix González-Torres are. You might also know their stories: Frazier’s story of wealth, beauty, anorexia and addiction. Or Proust’s complicated relationship with status/power and his iconic writing on time and memory. Or perhaps you know of González-Torres’s queer, elegant artwork, his themes of borrowed time and impending loss and his inevitable death from AIDS. So yes, this piece is about all of those things and my insistence that a recently dated internet caption encompass all of the history of these complicated figures. And you might laugh. Or cry.” - Joe Mama-Nitzberg