| | | | DECODE BOOKSLori Nix: The CityText by Barbara Pollack.
 Over the past eight years, Lori Nix (born 1969) has created meticulously detailed model environments and then photographed them--locations within a fictional city that celebrate modern culture, knowledge and innovation. But her monuments of civilization are abandoned, in a state of ruin where nature has begun to repopulate the spaces. “I am fascinated, maybe even a little obsessed, with the idea of the apocalypse. In addition to my childhood experiences growing up with natural disasters in Kansas, I also watched disaster flicks in the 1970s. Each of these experiences has greatly influenced my photographic work.” Nix considers herself a “faux landscape photographer” and spends months building the complex spaces before photographing them. As critic Sidney Lawrence wrote in Art in America: “Oddly endearing, terrifying and often electrifyingly plausible, [Nix’s tableaux] prod us to ponder the fact that, like it or not, our fate is uncertain.”
Featured image is reproduced from Lori Nix: The City.PRAISE AND REVIEWSphoto-eye BLOG David Ondrik The cover image, Library, is stunning and tells you everything you need to know about the rest of the images contained within. The titular library is in the midst of prolonged decay; three trees, possibly aspens, are growing up from the ground, fed natural light and presumably water, through a gaping hole in the roof of the structure. The decay of the library itself is in various stages: some of the art on the wall isn't holding up too well, and the walls themselves are discoloring. Dust covers everything, and library chairs are scattered as if they were hastily abandoned before the unknown cataclysm that precipitated the abandonment, and thus decay, of the place. OUT Magazine 'I grew up with the ethic, "Work hard and hopefully something good comes of it,"' says Nix, a photojournalist turned-artist whose very good, often post-apocalyptic dioramas are built by hand, taking seven months each to complete. The work is bleak in content but not in character: Destroyed bar stools lie alongside brightly colored, long-disused pinball machines; the head of a stone lion is surrounded by lush foliage; and a bleak, blue-red sky echoes more Rothko than Gernica. She may be obsessed with the apocalypse, but Nix retains an artist's eye for color. |
| | | FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/23/2013 Photographer Lori Nix constructs her post-apocalyptic models from ephemeral materials like foam core, balsa wood and colored paper, along with the occasional store-bought prop. "Bar" (2009), is reproduced from The City, her fascinating new monograph from Decode Books, in which essayist Barbara Pollack writes, "While this and other of Nix's pictures are obviously a commentary on global warming and a freakish nature set loose by human error, her technique elevates her work beyond didactic environmental causes. It makes me a bit sad that she goes to all this work, with all the effort that goes into building each diorama, only to destroy them after the photograph is taken. Just as she builds from scratch worlds that look as if they are being destroyed or are already destroyed, she builds in order to destroy. All that is left is the photograph." continue to blog | FORTHCOMING AND RECENT PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS |  | FRAENKEL GALLERYISBN: 9781881337232
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