Now, Santa’s Battle Wagon and a team of 12 robot reindeer occupy a patch of lawn near the pool, while a 50-foot-tall, 54-ton robot made partly of junked electronics diverts attention from the tasteful desert landscaping.
And forget about playing a few sets on the tennis court.
“Now it’s elf village, with post-apocalyptic extraterrestrial nuclear elves,” Kenny Jr. said, leading a visitor on a walk through a landscape resembling the set of a Tim Burton film. Wearing a beige shalwar kameez and a long, untrimmed beard (he became a Muslim a decade ago), Kenny Jr., 39, had the gleeful smile of a child given a very large sandbox to play in.
Georgia Eisner, his older sister, recalled how, years before he took over the backyard, he would appropriate her possessions as material for his art while she was away at boarding school. “It was clear my typewriter ended up in one of his structures,” she said. “My shell collection disappeared. He glued it to the wall.”
Remembering her exasperation, she added: “I would think, can’t I have a normal brother who plays sports? He was the weirdo that was always off playing by himself and talking about outer space.”
Kenny Jr.’s ideas come in a geyserlike rush, he explained, inspired by vivid dreams of aliens and distant planets. His main challenge is keeping up with them. “The amount of energy that goes through me is absolutely, utterly relentless,” he said. “Think of it as the floodgates are unleashed and the flood doesn’t ever stop. It’s been that way my whole life.”
For several years, his creative energy has been channeled into Robo Lights, the ever-expanding holiday display he began in 1986, at age 12. Last year, 20,000 people visited the sprawling installation, which features Santa’s Pink Robot Store and a manger scene with baby Jesus wearing a Sumo-style topknot and wise men bearing gifts of toy microwaves.
Twin Palms, the estate Frank Sinatra owned one block over, grows paler as a neighborhood attraction every year.
In October, an indoor version of Robo Lights will be on display at the American Visionary Art Museum, or AVAM, in Baltimore, said Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, the museum’s director and founder. Kenny Jr.’s work will be part of an exhibit on technology called “Human, Soul and Machine: The Coming Singularity.”
“Kenny is one of a handful of people who continue to fascinate me,” Ms. Hoffberger said. “There’s a lot of sci-fi work out there, and it tends to look alike. His work looks like no one else’s.”
LIKE A ONE-MAN RECYCLING CENTER, Kenny Jr. collects old phones, cassette tapes, wood, the innards of slot machines, garbage can lids, pool filters, a neighbor’s wrecked glider, an air compressor from a commercial building — anything he can get his hands on, basically — and using multiple cans of Touch ’n Foam sealant, gives form to his visions.
His sculptures have a Seurat-like quality: a pink Clydesdale looks monumental from a distance; up close, its hooves are revealed as boxy computer monitors, its noble head a printer and fax machine glued together, its mane a tangle of power cords.
Aliens, robots and monsters appear in Kenny Jr.’s work with obsessive frequency. But he maintains that his inspiration doesn’t come from comic books or B-movies. His robot sculptures are “instantaneously generated creations that go through my mind,” he said. “I know exactly what they look like, and I make them.” (An interest in the far-out is perhaps hereditary: Kenny Jr.’s paternal grandmother was a singer and bandleader whose 1969 album, “Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela,” a jazzy account of her “trip” to the moon, is a cult classic for its wacky naïveté. Tony Kushner wrote a play about her called “Flip Flop Fly.”)
Kenny Jr. beamed into the larger culture briefly in 2010, when Conan O’Brien asked him to design the holiday set for his talk show. The host appeared delighted with the results (Godzilla wielding a candy cane; a Christmas U.F.O.), though it was hard to tell if the creator was in on the joke. In a backstage interview, Kenny Jr. answered Mr. O’Brien’s sardonic questions about “Mr. and Mrs. Sanmagnetron Claus” with deadpan sincerity, seemingly oblivious to the incongruity of a man in full Islamic dress designing Christmas decorations.
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