ABOUT THE ARTIST
The American artist Lori Nix (*1969) and her partner Kathleen Gerber (*1967) have been performing as the artist duo NIX/GERBER since 2017. In previous years, they worked together on Lori Nix’s series “The City” and “Lost.”
The duo painstakingly creates post-apocalyptic dioramas and miniature worlds, which are photographed with a digital camera under carefully coordinated lighting. Nix and Gerber consciously avoid digital processing and instead rely on traditional photographic techniques, which lends their images an almost painterly quality.
The detailed photographs depict deserted places, destroyed architecture, and urban structures. In the series “The City,” Nix/Gerber create a now-uninhabited urban world that is slowly decaying and gradually being reclaimed by nature.
What at first glance appears to be a snapshot of real, ruined places reveals itself upon closer inspection as a completely constructed model world. Lori Nix’s studies in ceramics and photography at Ohio University laid essential foundations for this artistic process.
Kansas-born artist Lori Nix draws inspiration for her imagery from disaster films of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as childhood memories of the destructive power of nature.
The color aesthetic in Nix/Gerber’s works draws inspiration from Romanticism and the Hudson River School—a group of 19th-century American artists dedicated to nature and landscape painting.
By focusing on the traces of urban life—but without the physical presence of the original city dwellers—Nix and Gerber offer a critical yet poetic perspective on the paradox between human intervention and its gradual revision by nature.
The works of Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber operate at the intersection of photography, sculpture, architecture, and narrative. They pose questions not only about the future of our cities, but also about the value of material things and the role of humans in their environment – and what remains of it.
Selected Works
Rift (2016)
Edition size: 50
Archival pigment print
60 x 40 cm
