By JRS
"Majestic"
Lori Nix arrived in New York from a small town in Kansas in the late 90s to work in a photo lab. Realizing that New York was the center on the photography universe, she picked up and moved from a town with two traffic lights to the bustling metropolis she now calls home.
Nix has carved out a niche for herself in the world of photography: she and her collaborator Kathleen Gerber (a self-described “model maker”) spend anywhere from 3 to 7 months constructing scale models of post-apocalyptic scenes with such painstaking detail that one doesn’t always surmise that they’re models upon first viewing. The relationship is nearly perfect, with Gerber taking care of all the painstaking minutia that Nix “doesn’t have the patience for.”
"Church"
Scenes the pair has created over the years have included theaters, bars, libraries, a church, a laundromat, and others, including a backdrop from a Museum of Natural History under renovation. Every model starts with one object, which then acts as an anchor to tie the rest of the model to, in terms of scale. For the library, it was a globe. In the theater, it was a miniature piano. What do they do with the models once they’ve finished with the photography, which can take up to 2 weeks days? “We get rid of it,” explains Lori, over lunch in Manhattan’s Standard Grill. “After we’ve spent that much time building one of the models, we can’t get it out of our sight fast enough.”
Director of Light Work, Jeffrey Hoone, says it best: “Over the past thirty years, the constructed photograph has become an integral voice in the dialogue of contemporary photography. From Bernard Faucon’s carefully constructed scenes of mannequins of children, to Laurie Simmons’ and Cindy Sherman’s pivotal deconstructions of gender roles, to Jim Casebere’s elegant architectural studies, to the monumental productions by Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson, the practice of constructing images from the imagination has allowed photographers to explore, question, and extend pliable links between the veracity of photography as evidence and the photograph as extension of the imagination. As an artist in her early thirties Nix isn’t very far removed from the experiences that inform her work. Recalling a pond that froze over early in the season trapping thousands of frogs in the ice and then chipping them out to throw at her sister is a memory site that she continues to evolve as her work matures. When you compare her work to that of Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson, whose epic scenes and monumental scale can overwhelm the viewer with their technical virtuosity, Nix’s photographs, while describing disaster and impending doom, come across with the innocence and visceral impact of a scary story told around the campfire. And like any well told story the power of Nix’s photographs rely as heavily on the imagination and trepidation of the viewer as they do on the strength and timbre of her voice.”
Look for much more to come from the lens of Lori Nix.
Lori Nix's "Library," which was completed over the course of 7 months
