Landscapes of “a world gone wrong”

[Image: Flood].

Artist-photographer Lori Nix creates miniature landscapes “out of any material that will simulate a real landscape; for example faux fur becomes field grass, buckwheat flour becomes dirt.”
She then photographs these sets, producing evidence of “a world gone wrong.”

[Image: Blimp].

These disasters, camouflaged within idyllic surroundings – Nix’s series is entitled “Accidentally Kansas” – are not even immediately noticeable –

[Image: Ice Storm, 1999].

– until they’re all but impossible to ignore.

[Image: Plane].

While resembling the work – or at least the working methods – of Oliver Boberg and Thomas Demand, there is something much more readily pronounced in almost all of Nix’s photographs: a sense of humor.

[Image: Parade, 2004].

My immediate response here is: 1) you have to build more of these things, they’re crazy, you could have skyscraper infernos and earthquakes leveling Los Angeles and pitch-black space shuttles hurtling past the moon and…; but then I calm down and think: 2) how about some avian flu?
28 Days Later meets an illegal container ship full of infected chickens and people on the streets of London go toppling over like dominos, bodies in heaps in Piccadilly Circus, the King’s Road lined with cadavers…
Lori Nix takes the photograph and: simulation precedes reality.

(Lori Nix discovered via the very, very excellent things magazine).