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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 orphanag