Lori Nix/Kathleen Gerber

Lori Nix, Anatomy Classroom, 2012

The City

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Lori Nix, Olympic Forest, 2010

Unnatural History

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Lori Nix, Three Figures, 2001

Some Other Place

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Lori Nix, Flood, 1998, chromogenic print, edition of 7

Accidental Kansas

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Biographical Information

(Nix: American, b. 1969) (Gerber: American, 1967) Artists Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber are based in Cincinnati, OH and Brooklyn, NY. This duo have collaborated on creating and photographing dioramas and miniatures for over twenty years. Their images of faux landscapes and gritty urban interiors have gained wide acclaim in both the U.S. and Europe. Their series The City was published in an artist monograph in 2013 by Decode Books, and in 2014, Lori Nix received a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography.

Nix considers herself a “faux landscape photographer”, and her work is influenced by extreme weather and disaster films. She works without digital manipulation, using miniatures and models to create surreal scenes and landscapes, building dioramas that range from 20 inches to six feet in diameter. They take several months to build, and two to three weeks to photograph. Nix works with Kathleen Gerber, a trained glass artist, constructing most of the scenery by hand from scratch, using “foam and glue and paint and anything else handy.” After the final photograph is made, the artists harvest the diorama for pieces for future use and dismantle the diorama.

Works by this collaborative team are held in numerous collections including the El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA, Sir Elton John Photography Collection, Julie Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn, AL, Microsoft Art Collection, Redmond, WA, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX,Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, and the Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas University, Lawrence, KS.