THE LONELY FEARSCAPES OF LORI NIX
I relate to the world of Lori Nix, not because I have ever had the impulse to photograph deers lapping up radioactive waste, but because I, too, was raised in rural Kansas, with its surfeit of oversize chirring cicadas, ominous tornado alleys, and blue-black ice storms. From Cherryvale to Burns, my early memories are peppered with the same peculiar archetypes. Nix prefers a casual distance from each event, whether intimating a child overcome by wasps below an idyllic Kansas field or a flea-like suicide leaping from a bridge. Like Hitchcock, she has a penchant for gallows humor and possesses the ability to freeze time while simultaneously expanding it; in Nix’s fearscapes, the camera hovers between sky and water as it records a chthonian fable of paralyzed victims trapped in ice, seawater, or air, like primordial insects in amber. Nix is more capricious than Zeus with her pleasantly violent dioramas; how else to explain the hapless churgoers split asunder by a gnarled bolt of irony, or the storm-tossed couple reeling in the shadows of a Hokusai-inspired tidal wave? For more details on her fascinating aesthetic, visit her website. Or just read this blurb she sent to me this evening:
Lori Nix has lived most of her life in the rural Midwest. A childhood spent playing in open fields and witnessing countless storms and natural disasters has left her with a deep affection for the American landscape. This love of the land and sky in its endless variations, and a fascination with the absurdities of life has developed into a series of constructed environments that form the basis of her photographs. Cardboard, plaster, faux fur and paint are employed to create highly detailed dioramas for the camera. Like a movie still, Nix’s photographs capture the drama mid-story and it’s up to the viewer to complete the narrative.
