LORI NIX

WAITING TO HAPPEN

November 1 - December 31, 2002
Contact Sheet 119
   

Lori Nix is an artist who bends the line between truth and illusion in her photographs. She accomplishes this by photographing miniatures and models that illuminate her interest in the disaster movies of the 1970s and her memories of growing up in Kansas – a place that seems to attract disasters like no other. In her series titled Accidentally Kansas Nix creates scenes of floods, tornadoes, snow storms, lightning strikes, and insect infestations, all epic and defining events recalled from her formative years in rural Kansas. The state of Kansas is located in the middle of the United States geographically, and also represents the moral middle of the road as a state of mind where conventional family values and good citizenship go hand in hand. By linking disasters with moral imperatives Nix allows herself to question conventional codes of society at the same time as she explores the unsettling memories of her youth.

Plane, 1998

Nix finished work on the series Accidentally Kansas well before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and also began work on a new series titled Some Other Place before the attacks. Thus, a shift from natural disasters to psychological trauma began in her work before world events had a chance to influence her.

In this recent work, Nix has begun to explore situations that are eerie and ominous. It is charged with anxiety and uncertainty while describing disaster and impending doom, and yet is able to come across with the innocence and visceral impact of a scary story told around the campfire. 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.