I found Nix’s photographic creations very interesting. This takes photography as art to a new dimension, melding the artist’s craftsmanship and the camera. I’m not familiar with anything like this, so I must say that I was very impressed, stunned actually by the virtuosity and the vision shown.
First off, I was impressed by the photos themselves before knowing they were tabletop models, thinking they were the real thing. Then after learning how the scenes were constructed, I started thinking of the artistry and how it affects both art and the mind. Before I read her explanation of her creative process, I asked: how did she make the models? Did she photograph the real scene first, then create a scale model, and then photograph that? If so, then you have something twice removed from the real thing and a kind of meta-photography that proves to be rather mind-bending. At the same time, it made me wonder why she didn’t just shoot the real thing? At that point comes the idea that maybe the real thing doesn’t exist any more in the meatspace world, if it ever did exactly as depicted in the photos. If not, then how did those scenes come to be created? Did she create them from old photos, which would mean that they existed at one time and she wanted to create an individual micro view with a certain kind of inflection? And if they didn’t, then she might have wanted to recreate scenes that could have existed in the sense of a scale of possibilities that turn out to be downright eerie in their sense of place and space. Like Irving Norman’s art, Nix’s also shows a sense of and a vision of history in her creations. Pretty amazing altogether, methinks.
Fortunately, Nix talks about the logistics and the historical influence on her works, as well as the inspiration and her aim to depict a dystopian world with a rather bleak outlook, saying:
See, I could tell. Whenever I see a scene in a movie where they’ve used a scale model of a town or something like that, it’s so blatantly obvious to me…I guess I always assumed it was obvious to everyone else, too.
I might appreciate something like this more if I was to actually go and see the scale model, viewing the model itself as art. To build a scale model for the sake of photographing it, and presenting those photos as your art, though…I dunno, I can’t dig it. There’s something dishonest about it. “See this really cool, dilapidated old building I took photos of? Isn’t it beautiful? I couldn’t find it anywhere, so I just built it, really small, and snapped some pictures.”
That’s just my opinion, though. I don’t fault you for liking it.