Lori Nix G. Gibson Gallery

514 E Pike St, 587-4033

Through May 29.

Lori Nix's world is animated by disaster, sometimes vague and hovering, sometimes specific and devastating. Her dioramic scenes--assembled in a spare room, photographed, and then destroyed--are about one step removed from lifelike, which is to say that you recognize their truthfulness without thinking they're real.

These scenes are photographed to seem more or less full-scale, and are populated with tiny model railroad figures and houses and also with things that are artist-made, but part of their charm is that they're not particularly invested in fooling you. For all the intimations of doom, the images are insouciant, happily counterfeit, and this doesn't make them one bit less effective. On the contrary, their fakeness makes them a bit--just a bit--generic, which simultaneously dissipates and intensifies their quality of fear. They have the glancing impenetrable unreality of film stills; think Blue Velvet.

Nix's most affecting series is called Some Other Place, with all that the title suggests--namely, that bad things happen somewhere you're not. These bad things are rarely spelled out: three cops seen from behind, looking thoughtfully over a hillside; a pair of bunnies in a clearing startled by a helicopter rising suddenly from behind the trees; a flock of dark birds sailing Hitchcockianly past a house on a hill; a pair of tankers rounding a lonely curve in the road near a vast field and a rickety old roller coaster silhouetted against a glowing sky; a riverside street, lit up like Stan Douglas' Every Building on 100 West Hastings (which is to say, lit up like a stage set), with tiny figures--you see them at the very last minute--jumping off a bridge.

In this last work, the looming, lit-up street is more harrowing than the jumping figures; the atmosphere of horror is richer than the horror itself. All told, it doesn't require much to create tension: The abandoned roller coaster, for example, with all its sideshow associations, does a lot of work, and not being allowed to see what the cops see (how do we know they're not on a picnic?) makes the possibilities more gruesome. I can't tell you why the image of a few geese, seen from above, flying at night over a body of water that seems to be floodlit, is alarming--perhaps it's the vertiginous point of view, or the suggestion of an unidentified aircraft searching for something below. Part of the chill is derived from the contrast of the work's playfulness with the disastrous and often terrifying world the play-figures bring to life, the cavalier-seeming arrangement--as if the artist were God, or a child, or a child-God--of terrible events.

The works that bring a more specific sense of danger (such as, in the Accidentally Kansas series, the revival tent struck by lightning and the blimp headed for the power lines) feel, if anything, too focused. Some, like Pollen Factory (where the good folks at Claritin are growing giant flowers to ensure business down the line), verge on the paranoid. These are visually engaging and often quite funny, but feel more like punch lines. Your engagement with them is briefer than those in which you don't yet know what's haunting you; anticipation, as any horror-film director knows, is often more gripping than the actual event.

Still, Nix's take on the disaster offers something different from the pious victim-pornography of the evening news or the greedy opportunism of the documentary photograph. Instead it has the air of something rather more agitated and superstitious, along the lines of a charm invoked to keep disaster away, a ritual like repeating "earthquake" over and over again as you drive on the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

Anxiety and control make excellent companions. My favorite, absolute favorite work in this show is called Durbin Pass: a deep wooded ravine crossed by a rickety footbridge, backed by an apocalyptically orange sky. A single hawk circles above. Here, once again, the ominousness is so suggestive that you have to plumb yourself as well as the image to find out what's upsetting you. The setting may be fake, but the apprehension it inspires is quite real.