The fascination of miniature
I ran across Lori Nix’s website the other day, and am fascinated. Nix is a photographer who creates miniature models and then photographs them. Her most recent work (as seen on BoingBoing) is The City, a series of tableaux of grand but abandoned buildings — museums, libraries, an aquarium, a theater, a clock tower — being slowly taken over by animals, weeds, and decay.
Her miniature buildings remind me a little bit of Mars Tokyo’s Theaters of the 13th Dimension, which I’m sure I’ve blogged at some point or other, but they’re on a different scale, and their surrealism is less whimsical and more ominous. I’m also quite taken with Some Other Place, a series of landscapes with a kind of Hitchcockian quality to them. (The "Elysium Fields" one made me think of North By Northwest, for some reason.)
Why are miniatures and models so intriguing, anyway? I’ve spent more than a few hours staring at the miniature rooms in both the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. The life-size model rooms one sees in museums don’t hold the attention nearly as much. I wish I had a theory about why, but for now I’m going to see if Lori Nix plans on exhibiting anywhere I can get to any time soon.
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