The Miniature Apocalyptic Worlds of Nix and Gerber

I am amazed at the miniature worlds made by Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber.

These were all made pre-virus, but these abandoned businesses have a special, eerie poignancy now.

Artist statement:
"I don’t really have a death wish, it just seems that way. For the last eight years my photographs have highlighted a fictional urban landscape ‘after’. An aquarium after a flood, a church after a fire, a beauty parlor after…who knows what. Mankind is gone and what remains are vacant fragments of buildings, a few slowly being reclaimed by nature. These photos began their lives as complex dioramas sculpted out of foam board, paint, plaster and wood. Built in great detail from scratch, the dioramas reflect their previous inhabitants’ daily lives.

As an artist, I have always taken inspiration from my surroundings. I grew up in the 1970’s in rural western Kansas. Every season brought with it a new disaster or weather phenomenon. As a child I personally experienced tornados, floods, blizzards and drought. I was never scared or upset by them because I had my parents to worry about the implications. Rather, these events brought excitement to a life that by most people’s standards was quite dull. I also grew up on steady diet of 1970’s television and cinema. Saturday night meant the Carroll Burnett Show, popcorn and a can of coke. My small Kansas town of Norton, population 3500, had a single movie house that ran Disney features on Saturday afternoon, and in the evenings it showed the genre that was popular at the time, dystopian cinema. It was in this small movie house reeking of popcorn and sticky floors that I was mesmerized by movies such as Planet of the Apes, Towering Inferno, Earthquake, and Airport‘76. As a six year old viewing these kinds of movies, I believe it had a profound effect on the art I create today. My work to date can be described as disaster mixed with subtle humor.

I began “The City” series after moving to New York in 1999. Surrounded by great architecture, skyscrapers, and bridges, the urban landscape couldn’t help but find its way into my work. Still a fan of dystopian entertainment, think Blade Runner, Alien, The Hunger Games, etc, my current series is a mashup of my new urban life and a look towards an apocalyptic future. “The City” imagines what New York City and Brooklyn would look like if suddenly mankind had disappeared."

Top to bottom: Bar; Beauty Shop; Casino; Chinese Take-Out; Circulation Desk; Control Room; Laundromat (day); Laundromat (night); Natural History; Subway; Anatomy Classroom

http://www.lorinix.net/
http://www.nixgerberstudio.com/

BEAUTY: Painting--Scott Listfield

Despite the fact that painter Scott Listfield's Artist Statement emphasizes the present...

"I paint astronauts and, sometimes, dinosaurs.

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in 1968, well before I was born, so I have no firsthand knowledge of how it was received. I don’t know if people really believed we'd be living in space in 2001, if we'd have robot butlers and flying cars, geodesic lunar homes, and genetically reconstituted dinosaurs helping or eating us. But from Lost in Space to the Jetsons to Jurassic Park, it seems that popular culture has fostered this space-age perception of the future. Generations raised on these TV shows, movies, comic books, and novels are now grown and living in a future filled with mini vans, Starbucks, iPads, and Hip Hop videos. In many ways, the year 2001 failed to live up to expectations. And yet the world today is peculiar in ways unimagined in 1957, when Sputnik was launched, or in 1968, when 2001 was released, or even in 1994, at the dawn of the internet. The present is in fact a very unusual place, and it's strangest in the ubiquity of things we take for granted.

The astronaut in my paintings is simply here to explore the present."

...it sure feels like his narratives are post-apocalyptic (is it after a war? after a biological pandemic?). They feel like the last scene of the original "Planet of the Apes" film. A swamp has overtaken a Waffle House, a jungle has overgrown a Starbuck's, there's only a desert where there once was an airport, and The Monster's "Wall" has fallen, as all walls will (and it hasn't even been built yet).

Top to bottom: Animal Style; Billions and Billions; Cave Signs; Empty Palace; Krispy Kreme; LAX; Make America Again; Starbucks; The Bridge; Traffic; Underground; Waffle House

https://www.astronautdinosaur.com/

BEAUTY: Painting--Josh Keyes

The mission statement on artist Josh Keyes' website sums up his work succinctly.

"Josh Keyes' style is reminiscent of the diagrammatic vocabulary found in scientific textbook illustrations that often express through a detached and clinical viewpoint an empirical representation of the natural world. Assembled into this virtual stage set are references to contemporary events along with images and themes from his personal mythology. Josh Keyes' work is a hybrid of eco-surrealism and dystopian folktales that express a concern for our time and the Earth's future."

In other words, these are cross-sectional images from the end of the world. Or rather, the end of the world as we know it. We are gone, the animals escape from the zoo, join those in the wild, and all take their rightful place.

Top to bottom: Drifting; Entangle 2; Sirens; Stampede; Tangled I; Tangled III; Tangled IV; Tangled V; The Exchange

http://www.joshkeyes.net/

For the last many months, I have been having a lot of anxiety, strong emotion, and fear of the future and Josh Keyes' work is a visual example of a possible--even probable--future. I am not being facetious when I say that I truly believe the future is going to be a cross between “Water World,” “Mad Max,” and a Margaret Atwood story. Look at every element around you in the world. Now follow it to its logical conclusion. And there you have it.