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Lori Nix – not a name we had heard of before in modelling
circles but one I am sure will be known pretty soon. This German artist has
published a book of his almost artistic re-creations of real life that will
surely get modeller’s thoughts running into creating scenes just like this –
let us take you for a walk through his city….
Lori Nix - The City
Essay by Barbara
Pollack
13.25 x 10.75 inches
37 four-color plates
76 pages, hardcover
ISBN
978-0-9833942-3-5
Signed copies also
available for $60 USD at this link
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 and material culture in The City 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—Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Planet of
the Apes—sitting in awe in the dark. 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.
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Through the photographic process, each fictional scene is
transformed into a surreal space where scale and perspective create a tension
between the reality of the scene and the impossibility of the depicted tableaux
narrative. As critic Sidney Lawrence wrote in Art in America: “Oddly endearing,
terrifying, and often electrifyingly plausible, they prod us to ponder the fact
that, like it or not, our fate is uncertain.”
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Lori Nix has received many honours, including a 2010 and
2004 New York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artist Grant. Her work has
been exhibited throughout the country and is represented in the permanent
collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Museum of
Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; Spencer
Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas; among others.
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Barbara Pollack is a writer, critic, artist, and educator,
involved in contemporary art in New York since 1986. Her articles and reviews
have appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The
Village Voice, and Art in America, among others.
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For those lucky
enough to live in Munich you can go to see Lori Nix’s first solo exhibition in
Germany:
“THE CITY”
Galerie Klüser
Georgenstraβe 15,
80799 Munich, Germany
March 20—May 17, 2014
“The City” is available
for $60 USD at this link from Decode Publishing
