Lori Nix is included in the Humble Arts Foundation’s online exhibition Space Jamz.
I’ve never seen Star Wars in its entirety. Every time I’ve tried to watch it, from childhood to just last week, I’ve made it about 30 minutes in before dozing off into the comfort of whatever floor of sofa was beneath me. But I’ve seen “Spaceballs” and that Family Guy “Star Wars” episode, so I claim to get the “cultural references” whenever it comes up in conversations. Fake it ‘til you make it, with little chance that I will see the full movie in this lifetime, but I’m totally familiar with the controversy over Jar Jar Binks, Pizza the Hut still makes me laugh, and I’m a sucker for space ice cream, so I’m almost halfway there. Which leads to Humble Arts Foundation’s latest group show: “Space Jamz.”
Group Show # 47: “Space Jamz,” which features one image per photographer, like many of our exhibitions, looks at outer space through a media-fogged pair of beer goggles. Divorced from the full context of the artists’ complete body of work (and we encourage you, friends, readers, and people of influence to explore each of their work further), each image in this exhibition serves as a constellation point: a hodge-podge of film, pop culture and literary references to the interstellar. Amelia Bauer, Jessica Harvey, Maurice Depestre and Oscar Henderson-Pennington’s barren landscapes, for example, are reminiscent of “Star Trek” or Flash Gordan’s Martian territories, despite being shot in North American terrain. Krum Brice and Jacob Haupt’s hilarious photographs of aliens may owe more to “The Outer Limits,” and other early sci fi series and movies than any scientific attempt to explore galaxies above, while Lydia McCarthy, Ian Kline, Alexander Harding, and Julia Rene Jones point to classic, terrifying representations of alien abduction.
While this selection of nearly eighty images may not unlock the secrets of the galaxy, nor will they help us to understand the universe with greater clarity, they illustrate how photography can function as its own parallel representation.
Check out the wide range of work in this online exhibition curated by Jon Feinstein.
View the exhibition
Read the exhibition statement in full
Browse all of Lori Nix’s work at ClampArt
Blog post by:
Raechel McCarthy, Associate Director