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.

Total Recall (Self-Portrait Late 60s) is a self-portrait of the artist styled after the men of After Dark magazine. Emblazoned with a quote from Svetlana Boym’s “The Future of Nostalgia,” it manifests what Boym termed “reflective nostalgia,” which “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing” and rebukes the “restorative nostalgia” driving the nationalism run rampant in our present time. As Boym wrote, “the only antidote for the dictatorship of nostalgia might be nostalgic dissidence.”