Insidious Lassitude

Working in a studio that looks like a bombsite - or at least the imagined-site of an agoraphobic hoarder’s utopian fantasies - Lori Nix builds and photographs dioramas of America. The first series of Nix’s to receive recognition, 1999’s ‘Accidently Kansas’, posited the state of her upbringing as the centre of Middle America and its associated values and beliefs. The models are of disastrous, vaguely apocalyptic events being meted out to the state, apparently apropos nothing. Throughout the series though, there is the trace of man’s hand; his collusion in his own downfall. There are planes crashing, oil spilling, factories belching out filth, powerlines bisecting nature, farm animals mewling and lost. Many of the events take place under oppressive threatening skies, and of those which don’t, most appear straight out of a clear blue sky - 9/11-like. (Which, in a twist which surely valdates Nix as some kind of prophet - or a member of the Al Qaeda Kansas branch - was subsequent to ’Accidently . . .’.)

Somewhere in the margins of these images is the suggestion that Kansas itself has become lost; Nix once spent her childhood there, and now she’s exiled from that innocence - that time of greater certainty; that time of straightforward American values. She’s in New York now, making models of that place and time being wasted. The threat to Ameica is pervasive and spreading like the plague of insects Nix often uses in her images. The message seems clear: ‘We ain’t in Kansas anymore’.

Subsequent to ’Accidently . . .’, Nix has continued to plow a similar furrow. The images are no longer tagged ‘Kansas’, but are often unspecific, generic American scenes. This may be indicative of a perceived expansion of the threat from a parochial concern, to a nationwide and worldwide scale. Those marginalised by the American Dream are now legion; those displaced by the rapacious pursuit of it are now not just Americans, but whole civilisations; distant lands, and folk who have never even heard of the film ‘Dude, Where’s my Car?’, let alone laughed at it.

Some of the images - particularly the earlier ones - have a playfulness, though I find many of them a bit twee and glib - a Zeppelin flying into a powerline, anyone? And some come accross as simplistic hectoring. (They go down like a lead balloon, if you will.) But, like a child playing with toy cars, airplanes (as I believe Americans call them), choppers (ditto), trucks, and skyscrapers, Nix uses the mechanisations of capitalism - the apparatus of commerce; the iconic symbols of aspirationalism - as she takes the vernacular of the American Dream and reconstructs and recontextualises it. Nix literally uses the paraphernalia, the flim-flam, the ornery tat and plastic tack of American culture, and builds a depiction of a future where it destroys itself. Props to her for that (which seems an appropriate phrase; and an appropriate appropriation of an American idiom). It’s a reasonable conceit.

Those images of hers that work best are the ones in which the threat goes undisclosed a little more; those images which are subtler and more is left unsaid or open to interpretation. ‘Outpost’ (underneath) works because it allows various possibilities to arise in the viewer’s mind, and the suggestions are given space to collude and brood together - Star Wars defence system; undisclosed threat; alien activity; the unknown; secret government surveillance; the earth as but one of many planets. Here, where we live is an outpost, a hinterland, a place on the edge of things.

More at www.lorinix.com

And at www.coolhunting.com which includes an interview in which she wheels out an anecdotal aside about the length of time it takes her to make each diorama - anyone wishing to assuage a cold or negative reaction to the work should be pleased to note that it’s apparently “anywhere from three months to two years”. So there you go, it must be good.