Lori Nix | More Photographs From The City

October 17 – November 16, 2013

Artist’s reception: Thursday, October 17, 2013, 6 – 8 pm

ClampArt
521-531 West 25th Street, Ground Floor, New York, NY 10001
(646) 230-0020 | info@clampart.com

ClampArt is proud to announce Lori Nix’s second solo show at the gallery, which coincides with the release of her first monograph (Decode Books: Hardcover, 76 pages, 11 x 13.6 inches, $60).

Since 2005, Lori Nix has been meticulously at work on her series entitled The City. Building tiny dioramas in her studio in Brooklyn, she then photographs the intricately detailed constructions with an 8 x 10-inch view camera. The painstakingly obsessive process is slow going with only a few artworks produced each year. In 2010, ClampArt exhibited eleven of the large-scale photographs from the series. For the 2013 show, nine prints will be on display, representing Nix’s move toward the end of this particular body of work.

The City (2005-2013) imagines indoor, post-apocalyptic, urban scenes—what remains after all the humans are dead and gone. Critic Barbara Pollack writes in her essay for the book: In Subway (2012) we see an empty rusting subway car, its floor buried in sand. Nix tells me that this particular subway, the B train, is the one that she rides every day out of Brooklyn into Manhattan. Nix had found inspiration for the image at the moment the train emerges from the darkness underground to cross the Manhattan Bridge, revealing the New York skyline. Yet here in the photograph the subway is no longer capable of travel or transporting the artist into a new realm. It is dysfunctional except as a signpost of the end of a civilization, the river it used to cross replaced by a sea of sand dunes. Later Pollack concludes: Hopelessness would dominate Nix’s dioramas, if not for the absolute artistry which transcends her pointed critique. . .

Lori Nix has received several photography awards. She is a 2004 and 2010 New York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artist Grant recipient. In 2001 she was awarded a residency at Light Work (an internationally recognized photography organization in Syracuse, New York). Nix was a 1999 recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant; a 1998 recipient of a Greater Columbus Ohio Arts Grant; and she participated in the Artist in the Marketplace program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2000. Museum exhibitions include Fresh! Contemporary Takes on Nature and Allegory at the Museum of Glass, Tacoma, Washington; Picturing Eden and Vital Signs at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York; Katonah Museum of Art’s I Love the Burbs in Katonah, New York; and Innocence at the New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain, Connecticut. In 2012, the University of Maine Museum of Art mounted a solo show of Nix’s photographs. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts; Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas; Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas; Middlebury College Museum of Art, Middlebury, Vermont; El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas; and the University of Maine Museum of Art, Bangor, Maine; among many others.