Turning Your Head In Nellieville

The kids knew what to do and as soon as the car door closed in Nervous Nellie’s parking lot, they were off to explore. I was slower to react, though forced to keep up. Fortunately, I did steal a glance at the welcome sign and noticed that exploring the spaces was encouraged. I think it also said touching the art was okay, but I kept that to myself.

We started with the Western town. Interiors were decorated with all manner of interesting ephemera, including a lot of taxidermy, but it was the people sculptures that began to transport me. We were entering their world, rooms with themes ranging from a jail to a juke joint. My son's initial reaction to the people-like sculptures was fear. They had a presence, and there was something about their stillness that filled the spaces. What struck me was their eerily fixed gaze.

Exploring the various buildings felt more like entering a sculpture, being inside the art instead of observing its surface. It was thrilling, and there were rewards for looking carefully. My daughter even noticed an installation on a second-story window ledge, only visible to those who craned their necks. My eyes roamed eagerly, searching for what was next, a stark contrast to the figures who all looked straight ahead.

As we moved through the sculpture park, the urge to capture it was overwhelming and I knew it was impossible. There were sculptures within sculptures, a fractal of creativity. The artist, Peter Beerits, seemed able to create anything he wanted, making something as simple as a rusty pile of chains into a form worth considering.

I began to feel uneasy with the way he rendered the faces of the “inhabitants.” They felt labored, and while composed of an interesting variety of materials, the faces remained estranged from the overall feeling of playful artistic freedom. Their unchanging field of view began to feel torturous in a place that rewarded looking in every direction.

There was a distinct point during our walk when I was forced to simply surrender my analytical sense. It was a struggle to free objects from their known utility and just revel in their form. It was overwhelming, maybe like a return to a child's view of the world where much is unknown but shapes, textures and sounds are that much more enticing. That this heightened way of seeing could be sustained struck me as an achievement, hard to describe, but it felt like mastery.

I felt melancholic staring at a damaged but very shiny outdoor gas grill. It was actually beautiful, a form I had only a second earlier labeled as junk. How could one exist in the world on this wavelength of aesthetic intoxication, the beauty of our industrialized mess becoming too much to bear? Maybe it was easier to see things as they are intended, to be adult-like and practical.

We walked further into the park, and the scale of the pieces changed when we encountered giant knights and a castle structure. It was like my desire to keep this childlike vision had shrunk me down to child size. The wonder mixed with sadness when we walked toward a collection of broken-down vehicles gathered in the woods, apparently watching an invisible film from an old, busted-up projector operated by an elf. To be an adult felt like losing the ability to view these films, to no longer see the magic of these mechanical beings playing together.

The kids continued to devour the structures, and I struggled to photograph what I was feeling: what is the point of photographing sculpture anyway? A place like this needs to be experienced in three dimensions. My mind came back to the faces and they suddenly felt like a mirror.

On our way out, we stopped to read the welcome sign. Peter Beerits has been building Nellieville for the past thirty years, and I hope he never stops.