The next Artist You Need To Know is Lori Nix.
Lori Nix is an American photographer known for her photographs of handmade dioramas that she creates in collaboration with her partner Kathleen Gerber. Nix has often been credited as the artist with these works, but many of their posts and their site make it clear that they work in tandem, with Nix, perhaps, having a more dominant role in the construction and presentation of their images.
From National Geographic Magazine :
“The city is a ruin. Trains sit motionless on their tracks. Schools are silent. Libraries and laundromats languish in decay. Everyone has vanished.
It’s the end of the world as we know it, but Lori Nix feels fine. In fact, she and Kathleen Gerber, her partner in art and life, are the cheerful architects of this apocalypse. On a gray winter day in Brooklyn, the two women are working in their chockablock apartment cum studio, carefully building small-scale dioramas of disaster.
Their goal, says Nix, is to create and photograph “open-ended narratives—models of a post-human metropolis in the future, after an unknown catastrophe.” To “unlock, engage, and provoke” viewers’ imaginations, “we want [them] to contemplate the present. Do we still have a future? Will we be able to save ourselves?””
The images below are from the series Empire.
Nix was born in Norton, Kansas, in 1969 and graduated from Truman State University (1993) with a BFA in Photography, a BFA in Ceramics and a BA in Art History. She continued her studies – specifically in photography – at Ohio University. In 1999 she moved to Brooklyn, New York and has lived there for nearly two decades.
She has described her practice as being a “faux landscape photographer.” Nix’s images are created without any digital or such tools, taking pictures of miniatures and models in her dioramic scenes and tableaux. These constructions have been as small as twenty inches and as large as six feet in terms of their span and diameter, requiring several months to construct. Nix will then take several weeks to created the photographs, and she has used a large format 8 x 10 film camera in the past, but has also begun employing a digital camera in later works. Kathleen Gerber – who is a professional glass artist – builds these pieces completely, using a variety of materials. Gerber earned an Associates in Art degree from Parkland College in Champaign, IL and then at Illinois State University “studied a little bit of everything, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, but got my BFA in glass.” Gerber also has an MFA from Ohio University.
Often, when the diorama has served its purpose and Nix is finished photographing, pieces are often recycled into potential future ‘scenes’ or destroyed.
The images below are from the series Lost.
Nix’s words : “I am often asked questions about the inspiration for my work as well as my working process. As a ‘non-traditional’ photographer (I construct my subject matter rather than go find it) people find it hard to grasp what exactly it is that I do. And the fact that it is all done in front of the camera, with no digital manipulation, adds its own set of challenges. Building materials, lighting, issues of scale and space all become significant when you are recreating the world on a table top.”
Gerber’s words : “We do not strictly define what has taken place in the photographs. Clearly, we have a general theme – something catastrophic has happened, mankind is gone, all that is left are empty buildings and abandoned landscapes – but the details as to what actually occurred are purposely left fuzzy. That allows the viewer to bring in their own ideas (or fears) as to what happened. The fact that it is an image of a model and not a real place, can make it easier for viewers to place themselves into the scene and imagine what may have led up to this point.”
The gallery below is a selection of images from the series The City.
Significant exhibitions of these works have been staged at Galerie Klüser, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas), Galerie Klüser (Munich), Museum Schloss Moyland (Bedburg-Hau), Hillstrom Museum of Art (Gustavus Adolphus College), G. Gibson Gallery, ClampArt, Drexel University’s Art of Science Gallery, Bau-Xi Gallery (Toronto, ON), Museum of Art, University of Maine (Bangor, Maine), Hamilton Gallery (Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island), CEPA Gallery (Rochester, New York), Catherine Edelman Gallery and Flippo Gallery (Randolph-Macon College, Ashland, Virginia.
A more extensive listing of her accomplishments can be seen here.
Nix’s work can be found in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC.), Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, Texas), George Eastman House (Rochester, New York), and the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.
She has also been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014.
The images below are from the series Accidentally Kansas.
More about Lori Nix’s unsettling but evocative artworks created in collaboration with Kathleen Gerber can be seen here.