Lori Nix, The City @ ClampArt

Lori Nix, Map Room, 2010. Chromogenic print. Signed and numbered, verso. photo courtesy ClampArt

ClampArt is very pleased to present an exhibition of work by artist, Lori Nix, her first solo show at the gallery.

Since the mid-1990s, Lori Nix has been building tiny dioramas in her studio in Brooklyn which she then photographs with a large-format 8 x 10-inch camera. The monumental prints that are produced showcase the wondrous and obsessive care that goes into every minute detail of Nix’s breathtakingly convincing miniatures.

For her newest body of work, “The City” (2005-2010), Nix has been constructing indoor, post-apocalyptic, urban scenes imagining what the city may look like when all the humans are dead and gone. As critic, Sidney Lawrence, wrote in “Art in America”: “The implications of Nix’s tableaux never seem to stop. Oddly endearing, terrifying and often electrifyingly plausible, they prod us to ponder the fact that, like it or not, our fate is uncertain.”

Due to the great pains the artist takes in attending to every last feature of her constructions, some of the artworks, such as her new masterpiece, “Map Room,” require up to six months to realize. Thus, Nix’s scenes are highly planned in advance, and her output notably small. ClampArt has been patiently waiting three years for the artist to produce enough work to mount a solo exhibition.

Lori Nix, Church, 2009. Chromogenic print. Signed and numbered, verso. photo courtesy ClampArt

Lori Nix has received several photography awards. She is a 2004 New York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artist Grant recipient. In 2001 she was awarded a residency at Light Work (an internation-ally 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 Market-place program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2000. Museum exhibitions include “Fresh! Con-temporary 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; to name just a few. 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; Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas; and the El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas; among many others.

Nov 4 - Dec 19, 2010. ClampArt. 521-531 West 25th St. Ground Floor New York, New York 10001 USA - hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. - www.clampart.com 

Lori Nix, Laundromat, 2008. Chromogenic print. Signed and numbered, verso. photo courtesy ClampArt