2024/25 MCAD–Jerome Fellow Interview: Nik Nerburn

Melanie Pankau
Family lore, myths, secrets, and reconstructing memory are central to your practice. Could you share how this act of re-telling family stories plays out in your work or a specific project?

Nik Nerburn
My current practice started from having a lot of unanswered questions about my own family history. I really started to get interested in the men in my family. It’s a big part of the projects that I’m working on now. One of my uncles has a different dad than everyone else–we never knew who his dad was, and if he knew, he didn’t say. We had him do the Ancestry DNA test. Turns out his dad was the milkman, who had had other kids in town with other women, in addition to his own family. We were even able to find photos of the milkman, and it was uncanny how much he looked like my uncle. It was surreal, like seeing some kind of doppelganger. Similar things have happened to friends and colleagues of mine. I think that with the popularization of DNA testing and ancestry.com, there’s been a lot of re-writing of family stories. You shouldn’t take a DNA test unless you’re really ready to find out something you didn’t expect! Because it can happen. It’s fascinating how the stories we tell about ourselves can be destabilized really quickly. I see that as a potent subject right now.

Currently, I’m making a film about a milkman who visits a family at night. It’s a fictionalization of this family story. The milkman drips down the walls, the mother is a moody cat who drinks milk out of a saucer, and the dad is a giant cigarette that keeps smoking itself.

MP You work across mediums—experimental film, sculpture, puppetry, photography, and woodworking. How does your use of varied materiality (or materials) drive the content in your work?

NN I used to think of puppets as dolls or toys. But now I think of puppetry as a more mysterious process that can give shape to unspoken desires. I love going to a puppet show at Open Eye where the performers can just use simple objects, like a spoon or a string, to create something totally hilarious and transporting. A puppet is just a stand-in for something else. It’s a way for a deep feeling to put on a disguise and become real in front of us.

I feel like I’m drawn to an older tradition of movie-making, where illusion gets maintained using crude and economic methods. I work in miniature, which makes it easy for me to light and design a set. I assemble my films digitally, but all my sets are physical, because I like butting up against the limits of physical objects. The edge of a medium, like where it breaks, is what I find exciting.

I’m not very precious with my sets. I find old dollhouses on craigslist, modify them, build onto them, and ultimately destroy them. It’s all in service of the bigger project. Like a puppet, the more broken a dollhouse is, the better.

MP In your practice, you play with scale shifts leaping between miniature dioramas to larger than life photographs. Could you tell us how this creative swing in sizes plays into the storytelling in your work?

NN Dollhouse makers typically work in 1:12 scale. One inch equals one foot. If the scale is wrong in any detail, the illusion falls apart. To me, that’s the best part of working in miniature.

Incongruities of scale are suggestive of so many things. Objects can take on qualities and personalities that remind us of how we used to look at things when we were children. We would rest our toys in their beds, and play out long dramas with them. Puppetry is like that. A potato can become a lazy roommate. An ice cube can become a glacier. A giant pair of clumsy hands, destroying everything they touch, can become a bad landlord. Shifts of scale, especially in my work, are about the secret lives lived by inanimate objects.

Part of it is also a regional reference. Growing up in northern Minnesota, with gigantic roadside statues and Paul Bunyan stories, I always was seeing incongruities of scale. It’s part of the mythmaking of where I’m from.

The camera naturally shrinks and enlarges things. Photography is always some kind of miniaturization, putting whole worlds in your hand or on the wall. Cinema enlarges things for the movie screen (or shrinks things to fit onto your phone screen). I think the play of scale is built into the camera.

MP You mentioned your work as “...holding both the tenderness and tragedy that have shaped the men in my family.” I’m curious if you could share more about the themes of masculinity and vulnerability and how they show up in your practice?

NN I heard a story on the radio about a men’s group in Wisconsin that meets regularly around some kind of mechanical project. These guys will stand over the engine of a car and talk about their feelings to one another. The organizer says that “men prefer to talk shoulder-to-shoulder than face-to-face”, so having a project to focus on while they talked was helpful. I don’t know if that’s always true exactly, or limited to only men, but I find that idea so touching and relevant for men nonetheless.

In my film If A Man Wanted To Disappear, I was interested in the lineage of the men in my family. My great-grandfather, Joseph Nerburn, came to Minneapolis from the Upper Peninsula with his family around 1919. He lived with his family in a neighborhood called Oak Lake Park, right where the farmer’s market is now. Joseph was a mean man, from what we can tell. In 1930, there was some kind of accident or fight, and my great grandmother, Eva, died and Joseph disappeared. Their children were sent to different orphanages around the Twin Cities. My grandfather remembered it happening, but never talked about it. I found this amazing letter he wrote, where he talked about how growing up as an orphan emotionally stunted him, mentioned parenthetically during the description of a tool sale he went to. It’s so guarded, and yet totally revealing at the same time.

MP In past projects you have traveled to small town and rural museums for research? What have you uncovered visiting these archives? Any good stories you want to share?

NN I’m totally inspired by small town museums. In a little town on Lake Michigan, I went looking for some photographs of an old French boarding house somebody had mentioned to me. The librarian at the museum showed me this amazing folder from a WPA photographer who photographed every single building in town during the Depression. She found a photo of the boarding house, and made me a photocopy. It was a big old spooky building with men looking out the windows at the camera. “Just please don’t put it on Facebook,” she warned me. Apparently there’s a group of neo-nazis who harass the town council and museum staff, and insist that everything in the museum belongs to their militia. They’re keyboard warriors on the historical society’s Facebook page, threatening people whenever anything is posted. The librarian seemed so weary of the whole thing.

MP What is the most challenging part of your practice?

NN Sometimes my work gets seen as nostalgic, or simply regional. I’m always aware of that. I had a teacher in graduate school who said “Lean into the dark edge of your work. You don’t want to get read as Lake Wobegon.”

MP What artists, writers, thinkers are inspiring you right now? And why?

NN My studiomate Roshan Ganu turned me onto the film Casa Lobo by Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña. Their work is so great. I’m also revisiting all of Jan Svankmajer’s films. Currently I’m reading Gentlemen of the Woods by Willa Hammitt Brown. It’s all about lumberjacks and the types of masculinity they brought to the northwoods. It’s fantastic. I also just bought a big William Christenberry book that I’ve been wanting for a while. He’s an artist from Alabama who made these exquisite photos, paintings, and sculptures about central Alabama. Since David Lynch died, I’ve been rewatching everything of his. I’m a big Mulholland Drive fan. I actually got to meet him in high school, when a few friends and I drove down to Iowa to see him talk at the Maharishi school. He told us “Stay true to your vision…don’t let anybody fiddle with it.” I’m really interested in this group ORTA, which is a Kazakh artist collective whose work I got to see in Italy. Finally, I’ve been spending time with Ellie Ga’s work online. I love how she visualizes research. I’m also excited to see the new Guy Maddin film when it comes here.

MP If you could describe your work in one word, what would it be?

NN Interior.