At the end of August, some of the best graffiti artists in the world descended on Nelson Street in Bristol as part of an ambitious urban street art project called See No Evil. Over the course of three days, these artists transformed previously bleak and grey spaces and their looming concrete walls into gigantic works of art.
US artists included world-renowned a href=”http://elmac.net/”>El Mac out of Los Angeles and New York based Tats Cru,
images via antidote bristol
I’m addicted to the work of various photographers that capture amazing imagery of urban life. But what about imagery of completely created spaces that don’t actually exist? Artist Lori Nix photographs spaces however the twist is that they are spaces completely created by her as dioramas and not a single thing has been edited in the computer. She even chooses to work with film. Her work, like the image above, because it creates this magical world somewhere between reality and fiction through her lens. Her scenes from “The City” bring to reality the question of what might happen when people no longer inhabit our cities and nature has taken over – the ruins of modern day life.
Other projects like “Accidentally Kansas” create images from her own memories of the bizarreness surrounding reality and “Unnatural History” is based around the 1940′s when science was a bit fuzzy.
In Lori’s words, she describes her inspiration:
I am fascinated, maybe even a little obsessed, with the idea of the apocalypse. In addition to my childhood experiences with natural disasters, I also grew up watching 1970s films known as “disaster flicks”. I remember watching Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Planet of Apes and sitting in awe in the dark. Here was the same type of dangers I had experienced day to day being magnified and played out on the big screen in a typical Hollywood way. Each of these experiences has greatly influenced my photographic work. The series Accidentally Kansas explored my personal experience with the natural disasters of my childhood. The City postulates what it would be like to live in a city that is post man-kind, where man has left his mark by the architecture, but mother nature is taking back these spaces. Flora, fauna and insects mix with the detris of high and low culture.
images via Lori Nix
