New York City-based photographer Lori Nix has great fun setting up her tabletop dioramas of death and destruction and photographing them. Her large-format prints are on display 
through Feb. 20 at the Pa. College of Art & Design in “The City and Other Places.” I visited the exhibit Friday, Feb. 6 for an interview with Nix.
Nix, who uses an 8×10 view camera to photograph the dioramas and prints them on Cibachrome paper, creates her illusions the old-fashioned way — with miniatures carved painstakingly out of foam, figures and facades and landscape details from model railroad stores. Each diorama takes about seven months to create. “I’m used to working with my hands,” Nix, who was originally interested in ceramics, says.
She had been working with room-size installations in graduate school at Ohio University, but was forced to downsize when she moved to a small apartment. She taught herself to do tabletop dioramas from a book on model railroading.
Nix uses no one special scale — “I find one object in the scene and scale to that,” she says — and occasionally uses life-size objects, as in an image of a real tricycle, above which a small swarm of wasps are flying.
On the other extreme, one photograph includes an entire cityscape complete with bridge, from which one tiny figure is leaping. A second figure is standing on the bridge. What’s happening here? A suicide pact in which one partner reneged? “I leave the storylines open,” says Nix about her works, most of which suggest some sort of story. A junkyard against a twilight cityscape looks normal — a dog barks, the streetlights are on — until you look at the center of the heap and notice one car’s headlights are on, too. “There’s a Batmobile in there somewhere,” Nix adds.
Several photographs from her series “Accidentally Kansas” are drawn from memories of her hometown in the rural Midwest. “The only excitement that came through town was what Mother Nature happened to bring,” Nix says, which has led to her lasting interest in the mayhem and danger in life. Some of the photos allude to real events, some are imagined, Nix says — a plane never flew into her hometown’s water tower (“Plane”), and her family’s station wagon never actually plunged into icy water after her father swerved to avoid some deer (“Ice Storm”).
Another series, “Another Place,” takes a look at the darker side of the present. “Uranium Extraction Plant,” perched precariously on a cliff above a stream, with pipes dripping greenish goo and glassy deer drinking from the water, is based on a real plant in southern Ohio. The workers “all have to be tested daily … the deer have to be tested,” Nix comments. In another, which Nix describes as “Kansas meets Coney Island,” a sign 
advertises “Elysium Fields” over a barren field. At right, dark amusement park rides loom against the sunset sky; at left, a growth-hormone truck and a milk truck are parked next to each other, with hoses connecting the two.
Her latest series, “The City,” carries an apocalyptic theme. “This is the city of our future. Something catastrophic has happened — I don’t know what,” Nix says. In this world, animals and plants “have taken back what’s rightfully theirs,” Nix comments.
In these photos, the detail runs riot along with the vegetation. In “Library,” trees spring up and through the roof of an abandoned library (each book carved individually out of foam). Real sea sponge litters the floor of “Aquarium,” and a photograph of the New York skyline forms the background of “Natural History,” a wrecked 
museum. “Great Hall,” which might be a part of the same museum, features old dinosaur bones in a decaying hall, as a raptor soars in the background. Another photograph, of a glass conservatory overtaken by giant plants, contains a humorous frog gazing out at the viewer.
A shirt created from an online image and a host of other intricate details from unlikely sources go into an image of an abandoned laundromat, including a tiny “God Bless America” sign. “I have a lot of fun — I hope it shows,” says Nix.
