VISUAL ARTS
BY RICK LEVIN
THE WALK TO
BURNING MAN
Eugene artist Joe Mross and
crew build a steam walker for
the Nevada festival
P H OTO BY T R A S K BE DOR T H A
F
or a man currently wedged between a rock and that
proverbial hard place, Eugene artist Joe Mross
appears surprisingly serene. Here’s the deal: Mross,
a metalsmith and perhaps this town’s foremost
purveyor of the steampunk aesthetic, has but a
handful of days to complete the grandest and most ambitious
project of his life thus far — a 5,000-plus lbs. metallurgic
behemoth of rivets, Plexiglas, fabricated steel and
sandblasted wood that must be trucked down and set up for
Nevada’s legendary Burning Man festival by Aug. 25.
“This is huge,” Mross tells me as we stand
together inside his studio, beholding a work-
in-progress that looks risen from the fevered
dreams of Terry Gilliam and H.R. Giger.
Mross fixes me with kind and vaguely
bemused eyes. “This is the most complex
piece I’ve ever built and designed,” he says,
smiling through the grit creased into his face.
“The stage we’re at we should have been at
two months ago.”
Even half-finished and standing propped on
one leg in the middle of the studio, the piece
Mross and crew are constructing is awesome
to behold. “Lost Nomads of Vulcania” is a
fantasy geek’s wet dream. Described by Mross
as a “gypsy encampment featuring the Teluriz,
one of the few remaining Vardo Class Steam
Walkers built by the last surviving members of
Captain Nemo’s crew,” this exotically majestic
structure resembles the AT-AT snow walkers
that attack Hoth at the beginning of The Empire Strikes
Back. “Lost Nomads” is at once pre- and post-apocalyptic,
and its functional artistry blooms from some halted
intersection of modernity and the early industrial revolution,
where rococo complexity is rusted shut by the melancholy
price of progress. It’s a magnificent work of art.
To help finance the installation, Mross was granted one
of Burning Man’s rare honorariums, in which the festival
offers a chunk of ticket revenues to support select art
projects that are collaborative, interactive and community-
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oriented. And the term honorarium is apt: Most artwork at
the fest is unfunded, and the grant is a nod to the magnitude
of Mross’ vision. He says that the Teluriz represents the
culmination of everything he’s learned so far in his career,
starting with high-school metal shop and an arts degree at
the University of Oregon, up through the commissioned
metalwork he’s sent around the globe as the proprietor of
Archive Designs.
“I built a model with great detail,” he says of the
to-scale computer design for “Lost Nomads” he originally
PLANS FOR ‘LOST NOMADS OF VULCANIA’
created in January, followed by the detailed blueprints he
sent to Burning Man in March.
“It’s just a gigantic prop, really,” Mross continues, “but
built authentically. I really want people who know
something about metalwork to see it. It’s period work, but
it’s from an alternate period,” he says, explaining his
steampunk aesthetic and the construed mythology inherent
to the piece. “There’s a lot of flexibility.”
Apart from its sheer size, it’s the filigreed flourishes
and insider details that reveal the high degree of passion
and sophistication Mross has applied in creating “Lost
Nomads” — touches like the “TK-421” he’s etched lightly
into the metal foot-base, the serial code for the suit Luke
Skywalker stole from an Imperial Stormtrooper in Star
Wars. It’s Easter eggs such as this, along with the fact that
Mross and his rotating volunteer crew of nearly 20 people
(eight of whom will travel with him to Burning Man) have
fabricated nearly every piece of steel for the installation,
that give this nouveau-archaic structure such a heightened
sense of reality.
“I’m definitely in awe of it,” says Elizabeth
Anderson, the project manager Mross recently
brought on board. Like many of the volunteers
helping Mross, Anderson has spent her free time
doing things like pounding bolt heads to give them
that distressed steampunk look. “It’s just really
amazing he can make all these parts,” she says.
As he stands before “Lost Nomads,” Mross
himself seems humbled by the scope of his own
creation. “I haven’t seen anything like this,” he
says of past installations at Burning Man. “This
is going to be one of the things out there that
people are going to say, ‘That was one of my
favorite spots to hang out.’”
Of course, simply transporting such an
enormous work of art into the Nevada desert
represents its own difficulties. According to
Anderson, the crew will drive the Teluriz in
pieces and install it on-site. “To do this, we’re
hauling most of our gear, tools and the legs of
the Teluriz in a big-box moving truck,” she explains,
adding that the main body of the Teluriz will be pulled
behind the truck in a flatbed trailer.
And what’s to become of the Teluriz once the dust of
Burning Man settles? Anderson says she and Mross have
been thinking a lot about what to do with it. “It will
definitely be an attraction, and we’d like to let the Teluriz
travel a little bit,” she says. “It’s exciting and interactive,
and we’d love to have it take a little tour around Oregon
and beyond.” ■