Nik Nerburn

Tall Tales and Tiny Houses: Americana, Unmasked

Text by Christina Schmid

A giant potato – a practically room-sized oddity – lies half-buried under a pile of wood shavings. A dainty lace curtain hangs above the mammoth tuber while off to the side, a small portrait of a jackalope is taped crudely to faded floral wallpaper. A photograph of this unlikely interior serves as the opening act to Nik Nerburn’s MFA exhibition. Steeped in the vernacular of tall tales and roadside attractions, Nerburn’s creative practice unfolds across an array of media: photography meets woodcarving; sculptural elements turn into installation. In “Lineage,” the artist follows a generations-old family story from a boarding house in Minneapolis through the upper Midwest, to the lore of logging camps and dusty displays in small-town museums where quirky Americana collide with the cruel history of pioneer culture. The result is a multi-layered exhibition that meditates on masculinity, domesticity, secrets, and shame.

The veneer of folksy sensationalism – the biggest ball of yarn you’ve ever seen! – imperfectly conceals a different kind of story. In the wake of the Great Depression, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) set out to document the plight of rural Americans. Photographers were hired and provided with shooting scripts. Nerburn riffs on this history when he constructs a 1930 memo modeled after the actual shooting scripts and imagines an editor asking for images of “lost men:” itinerant individuals who fled family life and became part of tramp culture, riding trains and camping in “hobo jungles.” Nerburn’s great-grandfather Joseph was one of these lost men. Rather than simply abandon his family, he fled after pushing his wife Eva down the stairs in a drunken rage. She did not survive the fall.

Nerburn’s project engages this tragic family story as a speculative documentarian. In one series of black and white photographs titled If he wanted to disappear, this would have been the place to do it, he imagines spaces that could have offered a man on the run temporary refuge. Carefully staged color photographs, such as Moving In and Rented Room, created in dollhouse scale, suggest a compromised domesticity. Nerburn’s doll houses collide the iconography of an idealized domesticity with the insignia of masculine lonerism: wood shavings take over one room while outsized objects –a fishing bobber the size of a soccer ball – threaten a carefully cultivated fantasy of normalcy. Nerburn’s work carefully and gently unravels this fantasy.

The photographs vary in size: some hang in ornately carved wooden frames; others are blown up to wallpaper scale. The hand-carved frames reference the tramp and hobo culture of the Great Depression. Carvings, large and small, lean, hang, and stand in the gallery: a diminutive bindle stick shares a notching pattern with a twelve-foot wooden beam. Such shifts in scale and proportion abound in Nerburn’s work. In a table display that makes use of a model-train landscape – another hobby culturally coded as a masculine pastime – wood shavings imperfectly cover a moss-studded faux wilderness. The miniature clearcut renders the picturesque logic of progress suspect.

Together, the elements of Nerburn’s multi-faceted material storytelling lend the work an air of the uncanny and off-kilter. Loss looms large yet unspoken in the narrative’s folds: lost men, lost homes, and perhaps lost faith in the redemptive humor of tall tales. A single black and white photograph, hung amid wood carvings, centers a statue of a robed figure, cross in one hand, the other raised in a blessing. Off to the side, a worn tipi-shaped sign advertises a nameless “Indian Village.” Another loss, of unfathomable proportions, hovers in-between the stories that can be told. Nerburn’s work, through performing the visual equivalent of the sideways glance and trading in allusive entendres, invites a double-take that effectively shifts a complicated affection for Americana into a personal and cultural reckoning with histories that no tall tale can gloss over.

Christina Schmid is a writer, critic, scholar, and curator. She works at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Art, where she teaches contemporary practices and critical theories. Her essays and reviews have been published both online and in print, in anthologies, journals, and digital platforms including Artforum, Flash Art, Foam Magazine, afterimage, and mnartists.com.