Paci Contemporary gallery presents a new exhibition focused on Lori Nix, contemporary photographer from Kansas who lives and works in New York City and has been awarded in 2014 of the “Guggenheim Fellowship”. She has become famous thanks to her surrealistic images and her own interpretation of the Staged Photography. She belongs to an art trend that creates works at the boundaries between photography and installation: basically the artist recreates handcrafted miniature worlds, using common materials to produce surreal scenes of an apocalyptic world, that she will then photograph and reproduce in large scale. The exhibition offers not only a preview on her last series “The City”, still in progress, but also goes backwards in her artistic career, showing the early works such as the ones form the cycle “Accidentally Kansas”, “The Lost” and “Some Other Places”.
In this photographs Lori Nix tells the story of a world where humanity doesn’t exist anymore and nature is reappropriating of its own spaces, reclaiming what has been taken by men. In this way we’ll find ourselves in a sadly realistic and symbolic scenario. In “the City ” the boundary between truth and illusion becomes ephemeral. The union of a romantic thought of the landscape and the theatrical lighting sublimate the work by making the viewer feel a sense of isolation and melancholy. The obvious artificiality of the scenes stimulates the pleasure of illusion.
A question dominates the apocalyptic scenarios of the series “The City” : what would urban environments look like if humanity disappeared? Roads and buildings would become depopulated and abandoned and nature would later take over. This series of photographs is the vision of what a post-human future might look like. The
primary subjects of this series are public spaces, in the past dedicated to history and science, such as museums or historic squares, iconic environments of everyday life and of the history of our civilization abandoned: the scenes are miniatures made by Nix and then photographed, and represent the consequences of an unknown calamity in which the theaters of human existence are slowly being absorbed by a world that is back to its original cycle. Built like dioramas, or scale reconstructions traditionally used in natural history museums, Lori Nix’s images denounce the unsustainable nature of the current model of resource exploitation, and at the same time exorcise with the right irony the catastrophic fears they raise.
Lori Nix : The Power of Nature
Opening May 19
Paci Contemporary
Via Borgo Pietro Wuhrer 53 25123 Brescia – IT
