Lori Nix calls herself a 'faux landscape photographer'. Faux they are; they're built in the form of tiny dioramas using paper, plaster and fake fur. The exquisite detail invested in them betrays Nix's training in more stolid artistic skills: woodwork, ceramics, welding. For inspiration, she turns to childhood memories of the Kansas countryside and 1970s disaster movies like
Towering Inferno and
Earthquake: "I reanimated my personal history," she says, "but with a heavy dose of embellishment." Hence her penchant for the odd mix of beauty and devastation evident in the insidious creep of flora and fauna into elegant manmade space.
Elaine Hake
Lori Nix is one of the entrants in
Critical Mass 2007
