Tyler McBrien

But I mean, you joke, this is one of the reasons I was interested.

I saw it almost as like a piece of folk art where someone had just felt compelled to erect this massive monument at great expense, at great effort.

There's elsewhere in North Georgia, there's this other guy, Howard Finster, who's a folk artist.

He has this place called Paradise Garden.

And he similarly saw a vision from God.

For him, it was some paint on his thumb.

And the paint on his thumb, which was God, told him to paint sacred art.

And so he just made this massive cathedral by hand and erected all these strange works of art.

So that's one of the things that drew me in.

I'm like, why would someone do this?

Why would someone go through all of this to build a strange monument that everyone ends up hating?

Anyway.

I grew up in Georgia, in a suburb of Atlanta.

Yeah, and so everyone kind of knows about it, for the most part.

I mean, there's a lot of weird shit in North Georgia, and I've stumbled on even weirder shit on my many trips to Elberton and around, which we can get into also, but...

They, yeah, they were just kind of a, you know, a fixture in the North Georgia weirdness.

And I actually never visited them.

My sister initially told me about them and she had gone a few times and it's like a common thing to do to go there and visit.

you know, at night and have a few drinks or do a photo shoot or do a music video or something.

Probably a lot of rap videos were filmed there.