My town was too small to have a name; I grew up surrounded by the wheat fields of northwestern Kansas. I have been in tornadoes, blizzards and floods. As a girl growing up surrounded by what seemed to be the large expanse of an uncaring Nature, I witnessed some strange and gruesome animal fatalities. I remember a pond that had frozen over very early in the season, trapping thousands of frogs in the ice. I chipped them out and threw them at my sister.I love disaster movies. The wealthy people who had to come to terms with the mean and nasty elements in 1970s flicks like The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, and The Poseidon Adventure always seemed especially funny. With my adrenaline rushing, I expected to be thrilled and titillated by these filmed disaster epics and their impending doom. But in my firsthand experience of natural disasters everything slows down. I’m left feeling detached, except for an odd sense of humor in it all.
Lori Nix
The most familiar and yet varied sense of place may be the concept of home. And in her very own Lori-Nix way, the photographer reveals her clever interpretation of home in a series of sixteen photographs called Accidentally Kansas, which reference specific events from her childhood. She conveys a sense of home that we can all relate to in its approachable, humorous, and slightly off-the-wall way.Last spring, I heard Nix speak about her Accidentally Kansas series, amongst a panel of “disaster photographers” telling epic tales about their exploits in the ruins of Hurricane Katrina and in the wreckage left by the Tsunami that rocked Asia in 2004. As the audience sulked lower and lower into their seats facing these depressing, though admittedly important, events and thoughts, Nix stepped up to the podium and slowly said, “I have a little different way of photographing disasters.” The mood of the room reversed completely within the first five minutes of Nix’s discussion.
Emily Ryan, Spencer Museum Office Manager