Traveling in Place: Erika Nelson

High Visibility is a podcast on arts, culture, and ideas in rural America and Indian Country produced by Art of the Rural and Plains Art Museum,  a part of a longterm collaboration of exhibitions, publications, and events that share the richly divergent stories, experiences, and visions of folks across the continent. This episode is hosted by Matthew Fluharty, organizing curator of High Visibility. 

Today’s guest is Erika Nelson, an independent artist and educator whose work asks provocative questions on the place of contemporary art in the public realm, particularly in rural spaces. Erika's work can be followed on Facebook and Instagram. 

While living in a vehicle for two years, she traveled the nooks and crannies of the United States seeking out the odd and unusual, and gathering stories of people who built Outsider Art Environments and Roadside Vernacular Architecture

Erika developed her own traveling roadside attraction and museum  -- The World's Largest Collection of the World's Smallest Versions of the World's Largest Things, and she settled in Lucas, Kansas in a house adjacent to S.P. Dinsmoor's visionary folk art site The Garden of Eden.

Her work manifests itself in a series of interesting, innovative, engaging public art projects that incorporate art into everyday experience.

Through her travels, she has written a Graduate thesis titled Driving Around Looking at Big Things While Thinking About Spam, prepared a full meal utilizing foil and her automobile's radiator and heat manifold, stood on a sideshow performer lying on a bed of nails with a genuine Kansas Cowboy at the last functioning 10-in-1 sideshow in Coney Island, found out whatThe Thing is in southern Arizona, drunk free ice water at Wall Drug, eaten Rocky Mountain Oysters, bought a Genuine Walnut Bowl from somewhere along I-70, seen Rock City, and been stuck in a traffic jam in Branson in front of Yakov Smirnof.

Erika's piece Gremlin Cache was featured in the recent High Visibility exhibition at Plains Art Museum. 

Our conversation dwells on the communities, places, and artworks that tell the story of this journey. Along the way, Erika shares a ton of wisdom on what life in a small town in Kansas can teach us about how we live, work, and create across difference. 

This conversation was recorded in late summer, in that beautiful time of year, as Erika describes, when a harvest of ripe tomatoes leaves everyone ready to share the abundance with their neighbors.

Artist photograph above by John Noltner for A Peace of My Mind: American Stories.

Transcript

Erika: So, that was the confirmation of what I had suspected at the ball of twine. These were the magical places. These were the places that didn't have a reason to be there, which is exactly why they're there and amazing, and the ones that I keep getting drawn to.

Matthew: Welcome to High Visibility, podcast on arts, culture, and ideas in rural America and Indian country. I'm your host, Matthew Fluharty. High Visibility is produced by Art of the Rural and Plains Art Museum, and as a part of a long-term collaboration of exhibits, publications, and events that share the richly divergent stories, experiences and visions of folks across the continent. To learn more, please visit inhighvisibility.org. 

Today's guest is Erika Nelson, an independent artist and educator whose work asks provocative questions on the place of contemporary art in the public realm, particularly in rural spaces. While living in a vehicle for 2 years, she traveled the nooks and crannies of the United States, seeking out the odd and unusual, and gathering stories of people who build outsider art environments and roadside vernacular architecture. 

Erika developed her own traveling roadside attraction in museum, the world's largest collection of the world's smallest versions of the world's largest things. And she settled in Lucas, Kansas, in a house adjacent to S. P. Dinsmoor's visionary folk art site, the Garden of Eden. Our conversation dwells on the communities, places, and artworks that tell the story of his journey. 

Along the way, Erika shares a ton of wisdom on what life in a small town in Kansas can teach us about how we live, work, and create cross difference. This conversation was recorded in late summer, in that beautiful time of year, as Erika describes, when a harvest of ripe tomatoes leaves everyone ready to share the abundance with their neighbors. So, without further ado, please get comfortable and enjoy our conversation with Erika Nelson. 

Erika, welcome to High visibility.

Erika: Thank you, Matthew. I'm very excited to talk about things that I feel like are important that often get passed by.

Matthew: Oh, we are grateful to have you, and grateful to be talking to you today in Lucas, Kansas, right? Is that where you're calling from today?

Erika: Yeah. I am actually at home for once in... I’m usually gone about 6 months out of the year. And even pandemic-wise, it's been a lot of remote projects. But I have worked scheduled in Lucas for a full year. So, I'm excited to reconnect to community in a deeper way.

Matthew: Oh, man. That's a cause for celebration.

Erika: Yeah,

Matthew: It takes me (perhaps if we could begin here) to a quote from a recent TED talk that you gave in Kansas City. And it feels like a nice way in our time together today. “As a kid sitting backwards in the back of our family's AMC Gremlin on Long cross-country trips, I felt at home. I watched us pull away from the place we call home in a little tiny town where I’d always felt out of place. But summer was great. No status quo, no paranoia about social cliques or standards. A new life with every trip. Sitting backwards, I'd see where we just been proceeding off into the distance. If we were traveling west, I was looking east. When I would turn around, I would join the forward-facing discovery of making our own way.” 

It's such a beautiful closing image there. And I'm wondering if you'd be able to lead us into that moment of experience, and perhaps how that was a seed that threaded its way through your emergence as a creative person in the work that you're doing now.

Erika: I feel that, especially when you're young and you're traveling, you don't have the map in your head. You don't have the expectation of where you're going. It's all a surprise. So, really, the only thing that you know is the past, what just happened or where you've been. And especially when you're a child trusting adults to know where to go, it is very much a level of trust. 

And I remember thinking that my mom was amazing. She was this, like, “How did you know that this Grand Canyon was here?” It boggled my mind that she would know how to find this giant tear in the Earth's crust, or that there were desert dwellers that lived in houses and cliffs. “Mom, how did you know this?” 

So, she would craft these stops along the way for whenever we went out to wherever dad was stationed. Because we had a split household growing up. Mom wanted us to have a very stable childhood and always go to the same school, and dad was in the Air Force. So, in summers, since mom was a teacher, we'd all go as a family out to where dad was stationed. And Dad, during Christmas and New Year’s, would save up all of his leave for those months. And he would come to our stable, central location household. 

So, those sorts of trips always felt like just an extension of summer home/winter home or dad home/mom home, or a home that you're familiar with, to home that's new and exciting, and a bunch of different rules and regulations, or no rules, no regulations, and really getting back to exploring. 

So, in growing up that way, it meant that the map that I was forming in my head was about changing place. It was about moving place to place. It was about seeing what grandma and grandpa Nelson's environment was like in northern Minnesota, versus grandma Sappington’s in the Ozarks of Missouri. 

So, those became the map points for me. And in not having the actual map or seeing the real roads or knowing when the toll roads were, it started building out of those experiences first. And then it wasn't until I learned to drive and learned that it's probably important to note north from south, east from west that those maps spots started getting connected in a way that's more familiar in printed form.

Matthew: What feels really different to me, maybe versus our sort of commonplace notions of travel, is that a lot of this travel was a travel towards family.

Erika: Yeah. It wasn't vacation. It was to bring people back together. And it was about visiting in that deeper sense of long conversations, instead of... they were never holidays. They weren't tour packages or waterparks. They were, “Alright, we're going to move to the other home now. And on the way, we might visit a grandma home or a cousin home.” I don't know that I knew what a vacation was until much later. It’s like so you go to someplace where you don't know anybody at all, and you wear clothes you would never wear, and you swim in bodies of water where there are eels. That's never what travel meant to me early. 

And again, it wasn't until I was an adult and had my first real job, and there were vacation days. It was like, “Well, what do I do with a vacation? Where do I go? What do I do?” So, that was the first time where I really had to change that idea of travel into, “Well, what would a wander look like?”

Matthew: It sounds like, as a younger person, you had cultivated this map out of your imagination about how these places were connected. And I'm wondering, was there a window in just like your art as a human being, or was there an encounter with a work of art or person or something out of history that maybe was the first little germ towards the work you're doing now? Did it come out of that phase?

Erika: There was a very specific moment that was related to that phase. I got an undergrad degree in illustration. I did the normal job with vacation and didn't know what to do with vacations. Until I realized that I was fairly stressed as a broadcast designer. And part of that was probably coming from the gut saying, “Hey, what are you doing here? You don't actually like doing any of this. But it's what you were told you're supposed to do.” So, in that sense, the road trips were releases. And I would get back to that feeling of non-obligation and inaccessibility with a purpose. 

So, I finally figured out that that was not what I should be doing life-wise. So, I went to grad school to get my MFA. And it was a different sort of circular track into expectation that I wasn't sure how to break out of. And again, I found myself taking road trips whenever I was really, really stressed, trying to do all the things that the art world expected, but also at a gut level, realizing, “This is still not feeding you back.” So, I would take road trips to sort of, again, get away, but have my body engaged, but my mind free to unkink. And it was during one of those road trips on Thanksgiving, at the world's largest ball of twine, when all of it changed. 

Because I was going to art school and very, very pretentious, I only took slides at this point. I did not take print photographs. I only used slide film, so that it was this super precious process of capturing that memory, and then waiting weeks and weeks for the one slide processor to get it back to me. But I have a slide of a turkey launchable that I had at Thanksgiving at the world's largest ball of twine. That was that moment of, “This is what I actually like doing. This is where I'm finding what I consider real versus all of these processes and institutions that are professing to be real, and that we build our society around. 

But when it came down to it, my sense of discovery reemerged when it was like looking for those spots on the map. I had an atlas at the time that, anytime anybody would say something interesting about a place, I'd circle it, or something odd or unique that you won't see anywhere else, I would circle it on the map. And it was often in these rural areas. 

And at the ball of twine while eating my turkey Lunchable, which probably had some astronomical sodium content to it, I thought, “Well, it's Thanksgiving, I should go find another spot.” So, the next one on the map was Carhenge in Alliance, Nebraska. So, started driving, realized I didn't quite know how to get there because it was a big view of the US, which meant that each of the States were small. So, as soon as I crossed the border, I bought a Nebraska map at the one filling station that was open. And I said, “Whereabouts is Alliance?” and he's like, “Oh, it's really far away, and there's nothing there. So, you probably don't really need to go there.” I was like, “Well, show me the map anyway and I'll make up my own mind.” 

So, started driving, and by the time I got there, it was late at night, I had no idea where this monument was. So, when I finally found it, it was by the view of headlights, because there was no support around it. It was just cars in a field arranged in a model of Stonehenge. So, that was the confirmation of what I had suspected at the ball of twine was that these were the magical places. These were the places that didn't have a reason to be there, which is exactly why they're there and amazing. And the ones that I keep getting drawn to.

Matthew: That story is mythical.

Erika: And it's all documented in slide form. Like a good artist, I knew I couldn't just leave it to story. There had to be proof.

Matthew: Did you ask the question around was there a precedent for folks caring about this kind of work? Was there a tradition around this? Was there anything that was accessible in that moment?

Erika: I did start looking, but I don't know that I segmented into rural yet, because I don't know that I'd realized yet how powerful rural was in the story. But that's where those things do have this space to breathe and get fully formed and then get sprung on you after it's fully formed, and not just in the middle. And without building codes, we can often keep our eccentric ideas in full form, which is great. 

So, I started looking at more travel publications. There wasn't a whole lot out there, but in doing research, I would find books about roadside attractions. And there were a couple of really iconic ones. The Well-Built Elephant documented mimetic architecture. So, that was the first time I heard that term and somebody else during travels said, “Oh, well, you should check out Learning from Las Vegas as an architectural text,” and that was absolutely right. And then I reread some of Lucy Lippard’s work and then found out that she had a couple of essays on travel and tourism, and then a whole book full. 

And so, they sort of led to each other. And that started shaping the thinking, but it also made me realize how little of a peer network there was. So, the reason behind starting to document the big things, and making a list of the ones that I really felt strongly about was anything that was labeled as a world's largest, there wasn't a list when I started yet. Roadside America as a website had also just kind of started. And you could pull things from there, but it's a little cumbersome. And they looked at all the interesting things, not just some of the interesting things. 

So, I got to be the one that started narrowing down that niche. And now there's a lot of other people doing it and interested in it, because information is so much easier to share. But at the time it, it didn't fit into art. It didn't quite fit into travel. It didn't quite fit into the way that we're taught history, or culture. They were anomalies that felt truer. And because of that, they hadn't been put in a box yet. I also didn't know if that would fit into what I thought of as what my artwork would be. So, those initial road trips were really my own. And I wasn't sharing them with what I considered the art world at the time, which was a university-based setting. 

So, after grad school, you start looking for a teaching position. And if you can get a tenure track teaching position, and that's like the gold standard. I had one. I had the contract in my hand for a University in Pennsylvania. And this was the week that 9/11 happened. And that day, I decided that I couldn't sign this tenure track teaching position offer, because it didn't feel like a path that had options. It felt like I was pushed there. 

I think 9/11 served as a big wake up call for anybody who was on an adjacent path to where they actually needed to be. Like, this was the safer way to go, but what's the point in that safer path when you're not excited about the outcome? So, I took a week to make sure that I wasn't just reacting to such a horrific event. I mean, I was, but reacting with purpose versus reacting out of fear. But then I called them and said, “I can't sign this.” And at that point, I decided what was important about the art explorations to that point were the road trips. 

So, I sold everything I had, and moved into a bus that I had purchased. And I had originally purchased that to transport my artwork around the country. But I thought, “Well, how about if I just transport me around the country and find where I needed to be?” And I decided the 2 rules would be I want small towns. So, I'm just looking at small towns that had some sort of integrated arts component, which could be something that they recognize as art, or something that I recognize this art, but nobody else does. 

And that's really what started that meandering wandering path with a purpose. And it led me here. It's still leading me to other places. It's still directing a lot of travel, but it was a giant split from, “You get your degree and you get a job and then you get your advanced terminal degree, and then you get the job that you will always have for the rest of your life forever, and it will be stable.” It was a good break from that, a very decisive break.

Matthew: You had won the zero-sum game when that contract was in your hand.

Erika: I still don't know if it's zero-sum, because I keep it in my mind as a backup. I still thought I had that safety net, and I realized now how ridiculous that sounds, that there was no safety net. I do think it was either or. And I tricked myself into thinking it was it either or, maybe you can still like say after a month, “Oh, I messed up. Can I have that back?”

Matthew: How did you make it to Lucas? I imagine that you saw so many places and made so many friends and so many colleagues in that work over those years. What were the factors that created a sense of home in Lucas for you?

Erika: I don't know that I’d built that many relationships at that early point yet. I knew the art institution friends. And I knew that I really liked seeing makers of things, and I had this atlas full of spots. And so, while I was traveling south, I did do grad school in Kansas. So, one of the features of our grad program was a set of people who were caretakers for the Garden of Eden environment, and they would do a bus tour for grad students of these art sites. And you load it up at 5:00 AM, and then you got back about 2:00 AM. And it was just a bus full of art students riding around the country looking at these sorts of environments. 

And I remember on one of those that we did go to the Garden of Eden, I didn't remember much about it, but it was one of my map spot circles, and I thought, “Oh, that'll be a nice place to see where I need to go next.” So, when I came to Lucas, there was a Smithsonian exhibit coming through called Yesterday's Tomorrows. And I approached the art center and said, “Hey, I'd be happy to volunteer to help build things or promote things, just as a way to have a purpose in town, but still feel like I could explore.” So, I lived in a bus down by the river. It was a lake, not a river. So, no Chris Farley there. 

I volunteered for a bit. And during that time, there was an auction for a house. And I hadn't been to an auction for a very long time. I went, and the house sold for $1,200. And I thought, “I'm living in a bus and I could find $1,200. And it never occurred to me that you could buy a house that you own, that has electricity and a roof for $1,200.” And I just couldn't get that thought out of my head. So, by the time the show was up, and I was ready to move on. I was looking around town, and the house right next to this full card environment was for sale. And I called the realtor, and it wasn't $1,200, but it was still under 10,000. And then she immediately dropped it to 8000. I thought, “If you're dropping it this fast already, I think in the long game, it could go even lower.” So, started a series of just negotiations. And as I moved south for the winter, those went on. And in the end, I bought the house next to the Garden of Eden while I was camping in the desert in Yuma, Arizona. I bought it over the phone with cash for $4,000. 

I didn't ever expect it to make a connection with Lucas, I just thought of it as a home base. Like, “Okay, now I will have this permanent storage unit for the art that travels, or me the travels.” And I didn't ever expect it to become any more than that. But after my inaugural tour of California sites that I built while I was living in the desert in Yuma, we declared war while I was in San Francisco. And I ended up cutting the tour short and kind of zooming home and had some bus troubles where I broke down for a series of days, not realizing that I broke down with a friendly mechanic who ended up being a meth dealer in Salton City, California. 

So, there's a whole series of things that happened. And it reminded me that maybe having some stability would be good. So, once I got the bus back up and running, I did come back to Lucas and thought, “Okay, I'll just rest for a couple of months.” And in those couple of months, I started doing the next set of tours. And then those months turned into a year, and coming and going but always coming back to Lucas. And the more time I spent in Lucas, the more I realized that the people here were accepting of this sort of character that came out of the blue on a bus that could break down at any minute, but bought a house and was making it better. And now, it's been the longest that I've lived anywhere in my entire life. So, it's coming up on, I think, 18 years now. And I've never lived in a house that long.

Matthew: And as we're thinking about Lucas and just that environment, can you share, especially for folks who are not that familiar with the Garden of Eden, can you tell us a little bit more about that as a site and how powerful it is?

Erika: It is the second oldest, sometimes referred to as self-taught artist environment, which just means that the maker of it didn't have any formal artistic training. It sits on half of a city block in a town that is 4 blocks wide and 4 blocks long. So, it has a large presence. It is a log cabin that's made out of native stone instead of logs. So, it looks like a log cabin, but when you get close, you realize it's 100-foot-long limestone logs, or 80 feet long on house. And then surrounding this house, there are 3-story tall cement trees. And those trees are interconnected through this sort of pathway of, you could think of them as limbs, but they're a little bit more rigid than limbs would be. And on these limbs are figures that are arranged in like a 3D political cartoon. So, they are a narrative. They start at one figure and lead through a series on the street side. So, you can walk around the house and see how these figures interrelate and talk about politics at the turn of the last century. 

So, at first, it just looks like this amazing, creepy, towering set of figures, until you realize there's a narrative and can start piecing it together. So, there's like a bank trust octopus that is controlling soldiers who are firing their rifles at a Native American who's firing his bow and arrow at foxes chasing a bird who's eating a worm that's eating a leaf as an illustration of social Darwinism. And then in the backyard, the maker of this site showed how you could defeat those systems that weren't giving fair play to everybody. So, it has a justice of liberty with a spear in her hand that's piercing the head of one of those bank trust octopuses, and the limb that’s supporting the octopus is being sawed off by a man and wife with a saw labeled ‘ballot’. So, exercising your right to vote could take that take down the bank trust that were keeping people out of, or keeping people disenfranchised. 

And this was built between 1907 and 1928. So, World War I was wrapping up. Social unrest and conflict, we're coming to a head. The KKK was in power and being defeated at the same time by some really powerful Kansas voices. William Allen White was writing at that time. The Populist Party actually elected a Governor of Kansas in that same era. So, Dinsmoor’s work was really in line with that early populism of fighting for the rights of the common man through legislation and affecting legislation. 

And this is in the middle of a town of 400 in the middle of Kansas, and radical ideas and radical way of putting it up there. It wasn't somebody standing on a soapbox. It was somebody building his own soapbox out of cement, 3 storeys tall. And in living next door to that, it means that there is a super high bar for eccentricities. So, no matter what I do, it's like a giant permission slip of setting that bar of, not just using your voice, your visual voice in a way that can affect change, but also making sure that everybody that grows up in Lucas has an art experience from day 1, whether they recognize it or not. 

For some, it's just a tourist attraction. For high schoolers, it's just a place that you get employment, because there's not many employers here. For retirees, it was an income because they could also be a tour guide. So, it functions just like any other business in town. But its form is this fantastical, multi-story, interconnected illustration of culture at the turn of the last century.

Matthew: Was being a neighbor to the Garden of Eden really crucial in your own trajectory as an advocate and a caretaker for spaces like that?

Erika: Absolutely, yes. Because I wouldn't have known much about Color Foundation and the work that they do, or historic preservation and how it overlaps, or how there are giant gaps. So, living next to it and seeing its impact, but also seeing what Kansas weather can do to 100-year-old environment, and how much it costs to do that. And that is, we live in a pretty underserved community, and a pretty poor community. We're not the poorest county in Kansas, but we're definitely not the richest. And we don't really have a founder or a donor base. 

So, having to ask for a lot of help to be able to maintain that spot directly led to the preservation of the garden. And then working with those guys and realizing that they do this at other sites too. So, getting to work on those crews at other sites, usually as an artist advocate. Because in my wanderings, my purposeful wanderings, I would meet the artists who are building these sites. And sometimes, those are the same sites that would later get preserved after that maker's death. And a community group would usually be the ones to receive it or a family, but also be in that same spot of, “Well, we don't have the expertise or the cash to fix this. So, what do we do?”

Matthew: Let's make a bridge from that now back to the world's largest. Is there anything more you'd like to share about that part of your work before we make a transition?

Erika: I'm sort of at a frustrated... not frustrated, but frustrating point right now, because it's, I also recognize it's an industry. So, it's another navigation of worlds, just like all of them have been. But keeping at the core for me, the connection to why the artist did it first over anything else has driven, not just that exploration, but the exploration of the kitschy landmarks that people pass by but are built with a reason. I think that has been the bridge between those 2 worlds is that there's a reason these are built and you don't know that reason until you ask. 

And so, the story behind these environments have the same impact as the stories behind world's largest things and those monuments that seem like a one liner, until you dig a little deeper and say, “Well, why do you have the world's largest booming prairie chicken?” And that's when you start connecting to community through these roadside attractions.

Matthew: Let's dive into the world's largest. That dive could take 18 hours. There's just so much. This is a really important point for folks listening to please check the show notes, and we'll provide all of the links to where folks can weave their own detours through so much of this work. 

But maybe as a way in thinking about the world's largest collection and this kind of cultural change that you've been talking about as well, it takes me back to an exhibition from 2011 that you were included in that was held here, and that was at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. And in the catalog of that work, which is a really gorgeous catalog, you said this about the impulse behind the world's largest collection. 

You said, “The roadside vernacular architecture making up the bulk of my explorations has a dual identity, dual purpose, dual viewpoint. The towns and communities erected these identity markers are creating cultural icons, symbols and representations of who they are. Visitors and explorers coming to these monuments see these iconic structures as items built for them. Tourist attractions designed to entice the traveler and make them stop for a moment. My practice examines these perspectives, exploring the transient, yet rooted stories that intersect and points along that atlas.” 

And for me, it takes me back to what you shared just a moment ago about the things you don't know until you ask. In the intervening years since 2011 and the here show, I'm thinking about just the cultural, economic, social shifts our country has experienced, and in particular that rural places have experienced. It's really landed, in many respects, in a different way and rural areas. And I just wonder like how maybe that's altered the resonance and the meaning and the process of that work for you.

Erika: I think the physical nature of navigation has changed a lot. And so, we're back to that trust of knowing where to go, but trusting GPS for the shortest way, instead of allowing ourselves to get lost a little bit and making discoveries. Which I just now realized, it's sort of the same thing. And thinking about my Google Map, it's a bunch of stars showing, but no roads. So, it's that fantasy map again, but it's because I sought out those places. And so, just thinking about the difference between a digital map now and the physical map then, the places are coming forward again. But you have to know about those places now. You have to make that starred map to be able to get there if you are so dependent on navigation. 

And I think even the most seasoned map traveler is still very dependent on navigation. I will still put an address in even if I know where it is, just to make sure that I have those roads. Whereas that never would have occurred to me in 2011. So, I think that has really changed. And it's sort of strange how it's, for me, personally, gotten back to that very early travel experience of trusting the way to get there, but it's those points that are important. But I do think you miss a lot. 

Luckily, GPS doesn't always work and it sends you down a rabbit hole. And you might find the best barbecue you've ever had after running out of juice, or your GPS sent you off wrong. And you just finally turn it off and remember how to look again.

Matthew: And so, GPS would take us to Lucas to see your work and to see you. Do you throw it in the space as a museum? I mean, it’s an interesting sort of question, even just like on a language level. How do you talk about the space that you've created where folks can encounter so much of this work?

Erika: I changed it from ‘museum’ to ‘expo’. And I even had scraped of paint to take the word ‘museum’ off of it. I think partially because when you hear the word ‘museum’, it often feels past tense, like it's done, it's already ended. And ‘expo’, to me, feels more like the State Fair, where you have the demonstration building. And that's where the guys can cut tomatoes paper thin, or they have that crazy, amazing Tapi pulling contraption that looks like an infinity machine, even though it's just simple parts interrelated. Or growing up at the Missouri State Fair, there is a handwriting analysis machine that you wrote your name on a piece of paper and slipped it into this probably very fake bank of flashing lights, and it would spit out this teletype-like paper of your personality. 

And the wonder in an expo, that's what all of that sounds like to me. And the stopping point of a museum is not what I wanted it to be. It becomes really easy to lapse into, “Oh, yeah, I’ll meet you at the museum,” but I try to very consciously keep saying, “It's the expo space.” Because it's always going to be changing. It will always be a work in progress. It will never be done. There might be interpretive panels, but they might be factoids and not facts. And factoids or unproven facts. So, you get a lot more interpretation ability if you're just presenting factoids.

Matthew: And I know that the collection is ever evolving. At this point, say somebody has kind of come off the road from Kansas City, or Omaha, or come north from Texas, and I'm asking you this impossible question that I imagine you get asked all the time. But I'm interested in it, which is like, how do you talk about this project to somebody who doesn't know anything about it? And how do you talk about the dimensions of it, like how many pieces are in it, where the project is headed?

Erika: You end up with a tour version. And it depends on, it's also about audience. Art is always about audience. Or even performance, it's sort of like a performative object collection. Because as soon as something sparks in somebody, they'll tell you a story back, and that changes what story they get back from me the next time. And so, the depth of it is whatever anybody brings to it. 

I have the objects that tie to the stories of place, which I can tell endlessly. And that's one set of experiences. Or if it's an artist visiting and the collection's not quite up to presentation level, but I let them in to see how things are being built, that's another set of questions. Right now, working on a new Sideshow display for a festival because the expo is currently closed because we're still fluctuating vaccination rate wise, and disease wise. So, I'm focusing more on a slideshow that will be presented in September. And that means that it's the same small objects, but I'm curating which of those objects make it into the slideshow, and producing a set of large-scale slideshow banners for these objects to retell that story again. 

So, on that Sideshow banner, some of them are paintings of the small versions. Some of them are paintings of the world's largest thing itself and not the small version. So, you get that. The play can loop in on itself in so many different ways. That means that there's multiple ways to connect to the viewer. Shy viewers like to just wander through and spend slow looking time. For people who are impatient, there's also a miniature of a miniature golf course that's fully playable with little tiny putters and bibis for balls. That's a replica of a normal mini golf course, the Guney Golf Chain. And so, I found out that that was a needed distraction for the people who wanted to move faster that are traveling with a slow looker. So, you can put the fast trackers onto a mini golf course that will keep them occupied and give breathing room and looking room for somebody else.

Matthew: I think that there are a lot of very, very large art institutions that should heed the advice that you just gave about that.

Erika: I still... and like I look at museums and the language of museums too. And that's just another space for play. But one of my favorite artists, Randy Regier got to install some of his imaginary toys at the Toy and Miniature Museum. So, he needed to figure out a way to interact with the museum collection but not lie. And their simple solution that they developed together was that the museum labels that were truth were a normal font. Randy's inclusions that might not be all the way true were in italics. So, as soon as you knew the code that they used within the museum system to indicate truth or imagined truth is, again, a layer of play. 

Or when you think about the Museum of Jurassic Technology plays with this all the time, of presentation and truth and access and in access, and accents and non-accents, and light piercing the darkness, or darkness obscuring the truth. All of that is free reign. So, that's part of what the expo is, for me, is this blank canvas to continually reinterpret the stories and play with all of the meanings behind the pads in the stories and the viewer experience. 

I think that's also why it's hard to explain to people what it is for neighbors. Like, “What's in there?” they're like, “Well, it's a museum, but it's not. It’s an artist studio works, but it's not. It's small things, but they're big. It's big things, but they're small.”

Matthew: So, Erika, I'm really grateful for that. And so, much of what you just shared seems to take me to the piece Gremlin Cache, which is in the High Visibility exhibition, which was on new at The Plains, and which folks can check out in the online exhibition in highvisibility.org. And when you were talking about your work and about the expo, this notion that the depth is what they find there and what they cultivated what the audience creates, what they bring back, this notion of truth and imagined truth. That's like the layer of play that it's kind of like a compact between the work of art and the object and just like what people bring to it, it feels like a really gorgeous bridge into Gremlin Cache. 

And what I'm curious about as a way into this piece, in some respects is like how did it come together like as an idea as an object. And I'm definitely interested in how you would describe that for folks listening on the podcast. But just also interested in your reflection on how your work with the collection and with the expo informed it. It feels like it is part of an arc of ideas that you've been describing, one that is also conscious of what a viewer brings to it, and what kind of compact the piece creates with the viewer, and maybe even love what kind of questions and ask the viewer about their responsibility in relationship to these objects. But maybe just to begin, this long ramble is a well what exactly is the Gremlin Cache?

Erika: As an object, it is a cardboard representation of an AMC Gremlin that has a projection on the rear windows screen of mostly road trip drawings that are called from the last 15 years of exploring these places in these ideas. So, in the museum setting, it was a car parked in the corner, slightly up on blocks. When you get closer to it, that you could see the corrugation of the corrugated cardboard come together. Car people, it only takes 1 feature for them to know that it's a Gremlin. There's this cute little oop in the back where the slope meets the roofline. And just that little oop is I tried taking photos of just enough information for somebody to know what car it was, if you're a car person. 

But in talking about it, if you say, “Gremlin,” people see the see the fantasy figure first. So, you have to say, “AMC Gremlin,” and then you get to tell them the difference between a Gremlin and a pacer, because it is not a pacer. And yes, Wayne's World is a great movie, but that is not the car. 

So, the exhibition, when it came about in some of our initial conversations about it, I'd always wanted an AMC Gremlin as a personal drive-in movie theater, like one that I could take the seats out of and just sit in a bench and view those grandma's style slideshows of travels. And that was the main impetus of it. And then the play got to come in as a part of problem solving. Because in talking with a museum, a Gremlin wouldn't fit on the freight elevator. So, do you get a real Gremlin and cut it smaller? Do you make a new Gremlin? And I ended up going down that newer road. 

And while looking at slides to include, I went back to some early slides growing up and had some great slides of our refrigerator box forts that we used to build. And it suddenly occurred to me that it doesn't need to be metal. It could be that kids' recreation of this safe space that was still full of adventure. And so, it was problem solving that really made the mental leap into the object becoming more than that initial thought. And the images moved from being actual slides into the drawings, because just, in making those cardboard houses and forts, one of the best things after getting the perfect box and cutting the doors with adult help, then that inside was yours so that you could draw whatever you wanted in there and create that imaginary space through line work. 

And so, that's really what made it gel, and still ties it back to what I'm doing today. Because the small versions of big things are not precise. They're sometimes cobbled together, they're sometimes using very accessible materials to represent something. They're not exactly replicas, which is why I don't use replicas. It's a small version. And so, that word ‘version’ lets you reinterpret. And it brings the play back, because it means that you as a viewer have to give yourself permission to accept that as a small version, and accept the scale. And as soon as you get those 2 acceptances, then their minds are ready to play with you and go into a world that you've created. 

And that's what I kept thinking about. And you can't drive a cardboard card. You can't take that outside. The Gremlin just got read delivered on Wednesday. So, I was I barely had space in the warehouse for it. But I went back to where it came from. But I was thinking, “Well, I could just leave it outside,” it's like, “Well, you can't leave that outside. It's now a precious, precious object made out of cardboard that you can't let get wet.” So, suddenly this object that was metaphorical is still an object that needs physical care. And that also kind of talks about how we building care for our memories. You don't just leave your memories out for anybody to see or get wet or rained on or smashed up by a drunken brawl because you also live by a bar, you protect them, sometimes. You share them with certain people, but not other people. Or sometimes, those memories get altered because the projection's a little bit different, or you don't remember it quite right, or the drawing didn't quite capture the nuance.

Matthew: This takes us back to the opening quote of our conversation together, that notion the inside was yours, the one was having, like an intimate personal experience with this passing of land and space. And these markers that appear in a distance a small would become outrageously large, and sort of the sense of wonder and investigation is opened up. I'm curious as well, just as a viewer engaging with that piece of myself at the Plains Art Museum, that that notion of altered memory really came powerfully forward for me. 

And I know this opens up a space that you have written and spoken about, in regards to so many of these roadside attractions and spaces across the landscape, which is that the resonance from any of these spaces now is fundamentally different, in part because of the conversations we're having just about the very deep, multi-generational contexts on land, different as well for the associations are questions that contemporary audiences would bring to the sites to work about these sites. There is in many respects very different political and cultural conversation. 

I could imagine an audience coming to maybe sites across the landscape and asking questions about European colonial settler history and the way that these objects are carrying forward memory and that complex relationship. I guess, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that context. And how it's evolved, because it feels like the Gremlin is, in a really powerful way, also deeply within that conversation.

Erika: Even in doing a replica of a car, that's that first literal and metaphorical vehicle for thinking about the freedom to travel, and the privilege of traveling while White. So, even on a very basic level, a road trip means different things to different races, different situations, different vehicles that you're driving. All of that even just as a carrier talks about taking of land by eminent domain, taking of land to make it convenient for one set of people to move across a nation that they consider there's without the consideration of what was there before. 

And then, in looking back, you get into this slippery spot of nostalgia versus factual memory, that you gloss over all of those horrible parts of it, of the beautiful lake flooded out family farms, and sometimes uncompensated, or that mountain that you carved a bunch of faces on had been sacred. And in one person's memory, it is a much different event than the commonly accepted nostalgic view of how we built the US and how we travel across the US, and how we think about spaces, how we even think about public spaces. Public spaces, but taken from a public that didn't need to define a public space, that it was the people's space. And our public spaces are often not the people's spaces. Chasing out of public spaces a homeless population, means that when we say public space, we don't actually mean it. 

So, even just the car itself talks about a lot of that. And/or even the ethical nature of driving a car anymore, of travel anymore, of what are you seeing and why, and who framed that view for you? And what did that framer of the view want you to see? And what did they frame so that you're ignoring it? So, even outside of the subject matter of world’s largest things, just the act of travel, of travel is leisure is a very privileged White colonial viewpoint. And as one of those people, I'm trying to navigate that too. Like, how do I make my own practice reflect a real truth, and not this slippery, nostalgic creation that I've been exploring for 15 years? 

And then when you get to the monuments themselves, there are some incredibly problematic monuments out there that are... I mean, we talked about this with the more high-level bronzes in context. But when you get to the, what's usually thought of as lower-level kitsch, people ignore those a little bit more. But they're almost more hurtful, in that they're allowed to stand for longer. 

One of my favorite sets of sites are the wood long villages, which is a series of concrete teepees put up for motorists to stay, and you're not even pretending this is an authentic experience. It's just the Dineyfied version of a misinterpretation of native settlements. So, where does that land? And I don't know yet, because I'm the wrong person to answer the question. But I'd like to start exploring and asking that. 

There's a giant... Dillon, South Carolina, South of the border is a whole travel complex based on Mexican stereotypes, even to the name south of the border. It's south of one of the Carolina borders, but one of their giant mascots is Pedro. And it's a cartoonified sombrero-wearing Brown skinned person, but in an accessible to White people cartoony, and is just a name and an object, not a person or a race or history. And so, all of these things that we accept as road travelers as just being, “Oh, that's a funny little spot,” it's not funny. So, where do we go? And how do we address it?

Matthew: It kind of leads me to a broader question that feels really deeply interlinked to this question as well. Which thinks about your position in this work and within this field of work outside of Metro City areas. I wonder about your work as a thought leader and advisor on so many projects in rural areas, and maybe just even thinking about over the last decade, where a lot of change has happened, certainly in the arts and cultural space, and in the nation as well. 

And I think in thinking about these questions of where do we go and how do we think about the visibility of truth, and I'm wondering about just what changes you have registered in this field during that time? And what are the prospects and power we can find in this work? And what's your hope for the future of the field moving forward?

Erika: I hope that the conversations and the questions that we're having aren't done as tokens, that there's deeper listing one of the down parts about living in my own rural community is that those conversations can take a long time, a very long time. I've been trying to work with one of my neighbor's children, little by little, he wants me to stop wearing shirts with the word ‘fuck’ on it, and I want him to stop flying the Confederate flag. Because we are both offended by it in different ways, and don't quite understand why the other one would be offended. 

So, he's now 17 and driving around. Sometimes our relationship is good. Sometimes it's bad. Most of the time, I don't wear those shirts around him or in public, because he's expressed how offensive that is to a 14, 15, 16-year-old. And most of the time, he chooses to fly a Kansas flag instead of the Confederate one. But that's a 3-year conversation, and it's slow and it's bit by bit. 

And change isn't permanent either. It's not like you can tick a box like, “Alright, that's changed,” because we know now that when you stop having those conversations, it's like pushing things uphill. They're going to slide back a little bit. Or if you forgot that you're supposed to still have that conversation, you didn't see that ball escape, and it's now rolled down those giant pile of crap, and is one that you don't even want to touch, but you know you have to get it back to an elevated spot at some point. And it's going to be dirty and disgusting and hard and stinky. So, I think I can only talk about hope and all of the people who are still hopeful.

Matthew: Just the idea that it's going to take a lot of time, and the notion that change isn't permanent, it leads me back to something you said that just really has been in my head from our conversation ahead of this podcast that feels deeply true and also feels like a cautionary tale to organizations, foundations, really well-meaning folks who are seeking to address this question that you're describing who may not be from the community. You said, “In a rural area, you don't get to try again.” And that is really cut me really deep, because it's so profoundly true.

Erika: Just because I think, especially when you're getting used to a place, you see all of the things that, “Oh, I could fix that really easily,” if you're a fixer. Or, “Oh, I know how to address that,” without thinking about the long conversation that's been going on, either with leaders before you setting up the conversation for the leaders after you. And it's not that you don't get some do overs. But there's a long memory. So, if you really misstep, that doesn't get erased. And sometimes, it doesn't even get forgiven. So, there are sometimes those hard cut offs of, “Oh, you did not respond to our community at all. So, we are not going to talk to you again. We are not going to accept you as part of us, because you showed at the outset that you knew better. You knew more and you didn't listen. And that part, you can't do over.”

Matthew: And what I think is dangerous from a structural perspective is that something like that can contribute to how an entire generation orients themselves to some of these questions. The memory sticks in it spreads.

Erika: And you might lose contact with the original instance of it. You just know that there's always been this deep-seated mistrust between 1 organization and another. And it stems back from 1 incident that is passed now but had those long-term ripple effects. So, even those small actions do have ripples. That's why rural activists get so burnout to that you do have to be super conscious. 

And I'm a sarcastic twit. It's hard for me to keep that in sometimes when there's some flippant thing I want to say because I think it'll be funny, and not realize that could create a generational hurt. And that's a lesson that I continue to learn. Or if you do find that, rectifying it earlier rather than later. Or knowing that, if you see some broken parts, people might not be able to articulate why it's broken, that it's so long and deep seated that you don't know why anymore. It doesn't make it less than it is.

Matthew: Erika, I'm grateful for your time. And one final question that we asked folks on the podcast, just as a kind of outro question that can go in any direction is just like, what is moving you right now? What's inspiring you, books, art, places, food, traditions, music, websites, objects?

Erika: When you propose this question, it’s actually one of the scariest questions because it's like I need to have something really brilliant and esoteric, like an art student only taking slides. Then I realized, “No, that's not the point of the question.” And as soon as I stopped thinking about it, the thing emerged that it was. We did a lumberyard run yesterday, and somewhere along the line, some fresh tomatoes made their way into the truck. And cutting one open for a BLT, this is tomato season, and oh, I can just make myself sick on a fresh, vine-ripened tomato that just appears in your pickup truck. And that is the reminder of what is really moving me right now, of remembering where I am, what season it is, the generosity of neighbors, and stopping and enjoying.

Matthew: Erika, thank you so much for your time today. This has been a pleasure.

Erika: Thank you, Matthew for asking questions that I want to answer, and get to think of it. I mean, how often do we get to stop and reflect?

 Matthew: Thanks again to Erika Nelson for her time and generosity in this conversation. Please check out the show notes and the High Visibility site, inhighvisibility.org for further information on Erika, and all of the projects and connections she shared today. Thanks so much for spending some time with this conversation.