Lori Nix and our Miniature Demise

by Sara Gran

I came across Lori Nix’s photographs of a miniature postapocalyptic world on BoingBoing and quickly fell in love. As you may have noticed miniatures are a big theme here around the Medince Show. There is no particular reason for that other than that we love miniatures.

I am also seriously digging Nix’s series of what seems to be a created natural history museum fallen on shabby days. A few words from her website about her methods:

“Currently it takes about seven months to build a scene and two to three weeks to shoot the final image. I build these in my Brooklyn living room. I have miniature power tools throughout the apartment, a chop saw under the kitchen table, a miniature table saw on top. The computer room doubles as a model mock-up room. There are two of us who work on them, myself and my partner Kathleen. We split the work according to our strengths. I come up with the concept, the color palette and the lighting scenarios. I build the structures out of extruded foam and glue and paint and anything else handy. Kathleen is trained as a glass artist, specializing in cast glass work. She can paint faux finishes and gild architectural details with gold leaf. After I’m done building the structure and painting it, she comes in and adds dirt and distresses the walls to make it look old and decrepit.”

2 Comments to “Lori Nix and our Miniature Demise”

  1. now I know what I want for christmas: a miniature chop saw!
    these are so stunning—I love this one:
    http://www.lorinix.net/unnatural_history/06.html

    and this one
    http://www.lorinix.net/kansas/04.html

  2. Oh my God, I completely missed both of those–extremely cool! This makes me want to drop everything and work on one of my own half-baked miniatures projects–Tinytown, The Museum of Miniature Hardware, my small but always-growing collection of tiny keys, etc.

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