After inheriting a piece of property in Garfield Table, Nebraska, Emery Blagon sought to understand the healing properties of Earth’s natural forces. Inspired by the experience of watching his parents suffer with terminal cancer, he sought to create a space that could channel the curative properties of minerals, magnetic fields, and electrical currents. This endeavor would occupy the artist for the next thirty years. The conglomeration of kinetic assemblages in a shed behind his house grew to incorporate pieces of sheet metal, tinfoil, magnets, masking tape, plastic beads, Christmas lights, and mechanical odds and ends, along with wrapped bundles and glass jars of chemical elements and minerals he acquired from a pharmacist he befriended in North Platte named Dan Dryden.

The “pretties” contained in his shed featured symmetric and repetitive forms strung into constructions several feet in length. These were anchored by a series of paintings Blagdon installed stacked or facing down to the earth; they employ concentric circles or squares and often radiate from a center point. After his death in 1986, the “machine” was purchased by Dan Dryden. Dryden spent decades caring for the work, and Kohler Foundation, Inc., purchased it in 2004.

It was gifted to the Arts Center in 2007.