Lori Nix is a photographer and printer based in Brooklyn, NY who has been building dioramas and then photographing them since the early 1990s. She is interested in depicting danger and disaster, but tempers this with a touch of humour. She says her work was influenced by landscape painters. Her childhood was spent in a rural part of the United States which is known more for it’s natural disasters than anything else. She was born in a small town in western Kansas. Each passing season where she lived brought it’s own drama, from winter snow storms, spring floods and tornados to summer insect infestations and drought. As said by herself, she “considered these things euphoric compared to adults who viewed these seasonal disruptions with angst”. In her newest body of work “The City” she has imagined a city of our future, where something either natural or as the result of mankind, has emptied the city of it’s human inhabitants. Art museums, Broadway theatres, laundromats and bars no longer function. The walls are deteriorating, the ceilings are falling in, the structures barely stand, yet Mother Nature is slowly taking them over. These spaces are filled with flora, fauna and insects, reclaiming what was theirs before man’s encroachment. Her work on 'The City', looks at the convergence or change of a city. I really do like the way she has taken her influence from the city; looking at it and portraying a different timeline of it as truly as she can in her own imaginative and creative way. I also praise the attention to detail and scaling of her work as that is what truly brings together the whole scene. Nix said that in order to get the maquettes and models to scale, she first chooses one main item in the scene, builds it to scale, and then builds up the rest of the models around that. The main inspiration I take away from Lori Nix is the way she uses her imagination. She likes to portray things in a different perspective, and that is an area of thought I like to think about often when it comes to designing.
