Stephen Cohen Gallery is pleased to announce a new show of surreal color photography that explores the tension between truth and illusion through exquisitely detailed post-disaster urban dioramas. "Lori Nix" will run from June 14 to July 28, 2007. An opening reception for the artist will be held Thursday, June 14, 2007 from 7 to 9 p.m. A native of rural Kansas, Lori Nix is no stranger to the idyllic or the disastrous. She spent her childhood playing in open fields under big blue skies—and witnessing the repeated destruction of this same land by the sudden, punishing, astonishingly surreal natural disasters inherent to this region. This experience left her with a deeply-felt connection to the American landscape, overlaid with an awareness of impending horror that fills her work. Since the advent of photography, artists have played with the possibilities inherent in the medium to manipulate the reality/fantasy continuum. In the company of photographers like Cindy Sherman, Lori Simmons, James Casebere, Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson, Nix continues in this tradition, probing with the innocent wonder of a child with a new chemistry set, gleefully manipulating her worlds to a point just short of destruction. Creating intricately assembled dioramas out of cardboard, plaster, faux fur and paint, Nix sets the scene for the photographic image that is the final form of her wild imaginative manipulations. The work in this show is a mix of projects; from rural Kansas landscapes Accidentally Kansas, to urban city scenes in Some Other Place, to an examination of the internal emotional terrain in Lost, to her most recent project. Shadows of the City imagines our museums and public spaces as revered and lonely monuments to knowledge and history, slowly decaying - repossessed by a not-so-benevolent Nature. The recipient of several photography awards, Lori Nix was a 2004 NYFA Individual Artist Grant recipient, a Light Work Artist-in-Residence, and the beneficiary of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant. Nix has exhibited her work nationally in solo and group exhibitions from Boston to San Francisco. Her photographs belong to the permanent collections of the Harvard Business School, the George Eastman House, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.