The Four Dioramas of the Apocalypse

Judgement day never looked so hauntingly beautiful.

Matthew Watson
November 11, 2013

The apocalypse is something we fear, right? The desolation and destruction caused by a cataclysmic event is something we surely would not want to witness. Yet we seem to have a weird fascination with Armageddon, dedicating a significant amount of time to it in film, video games and those pub conversation about which of your friends has the best zombie survival plan.

Now Lori Nix, a Kansas-born artist, has shared her deep wonderment with Judgement Day in her exhibition The City, which depicts New York City devoid of humanity, scarred by the apocalypse. "My childhood was spent in a rural part of the United States that is known more for its natural disasters than anything else," says Nix on her website. "For a child it was considered euphoric."

This informed her project The City, which imagines "a city of our future, where something either natural or as the result of mankind, has emptied the city of it's human inhabitants. Art museums, Broadway theaters, laundromats and bars no longer function. The walls are deteriorating, the ceilings are falling in, the structures barely stand, yet Mother Nature is slowly taking them over. These spaces are filled with flora, fauna and insects, reclaiming what was theirs before man's encroachment."

Nix portrays this reclamation through a series of photographed dioramas that she painstakingly constructs, right down to the most minute detail. Some of you may have heard of the The City before and that is because Nix began the project in 2005. However, each diorama takes approximately seven months to construct, followed by three weeks to shoot the final image of it, and so the series is ongoing. It has come to the fore again as the latest nine photographic works in the series are currently on exhibition at ClampArt, NYC until November 16 to coincide with the release of her first book.

Explore our favourites in the gallery below and head to Nix's website to see the full collection.

Via Gizmodo.


Published on November 11, 2013 by Matthew Watson
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