The contemporary fascination with worlds in miniature may have a lot to do with our collective dissatisfaction with our modern lives, but there is also something else behind Lori Nix's tiny universes of apocalypse and destruction.
As writer, critic, artist, and educator Barbara Pollack highlights in the opening essay to the recently released volume The City (Decode Books), Nix was born in a small town in western Kansas, witnessing as a child tornadoes, blizzards, snow storms, floods and other assorted disasters. As a young girl, Nix also developed a passion for sci-fi and disaster films from the '60s and '70s that filled her imagination with dystopian visions of the future.
When she grew up Nix studied photography and ceramics, creating her first apocalyptic dioramas in 1998 and developing a series of images entitled "Accidentally Kansas". Nix's works are indeed not made to be admired, but to be photographed, challenging in this way the viewers' presumption of reality while prompting people to confront (and exorcise maybe...) apocalyptic scenes caused by catastrophes we do not even want to talk about.
The volume The City focuses on Nix's latest project, a city of the future emptied of its human inhabitants. Nix has been working on this new work for eight years, shifting her point of view from the outside onto the dilapidated architectural interiors of different buildings and spaces.
We don't know what happened to the city in question - it may have been a nuclear disaster, a natural calamity, or a "Day of the Triffids" case - what we do know is that there aren't any survivors populating the local library, an anatomy classroom with its miniature models of the human body, a large shopping mall and a beauty salon, an aquarium and a theatre, a space centre, a museum and a church.
Computer machines are rusting in a control rooms, an eery silence fills a busy laundromat, the walls of pretty buildings are deteriorating, and vegetation is triumphing in most cases, with plants and trees growing among the ruins, and sand dunes invading the subway, giving the impression that this may be the scene that Logan saw in his run from his futuristic city sealed off from the outside world on his way to Sanctuary.
Nix creates her meticulously detailed scenes and sets with Kathleen Gerber: it takes months to actually build them and weeks to photograph them, but the effort is worth. Her work won the artist and photographer many honours including a 2010 and 2004 New York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artist Grant, while her images have been on display during different exhibitions and are also represented in the permanent collections of various museums.
Nix explains on her site that she is inspired in her work by landscape painting - particularly the Hudson River School of Painting and artists Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, Frederich Edwin Church, Martin Johnson Heade, and the Romantic painter Casper David Friedrich - but also by the concept of sublime expressed by Edmund Burke.
Though threatened by what we see in her dioramas, we are indeed attracted and fascinated, feeling the same degree of astonishment that Burke identified as that state of the soul in which all its emotions are suspended with some degree of horror. And while we may not be too sure about our future reserving us the same endless scenes of dystopic apocalypse, for the time being seeing them in a photograph or printed on the page of a book, is enough to shake our indifference, awaken our imagination and give us a taste of the great power of sublime.
The City by Lori Nix is available from Decode Books.
All images in this post courtesy Lori Nix/Decode Books.
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