Whichever it is, Mike Nelson’s latest exhibition is the English artist at his most frustrated, scared, introspective and personal. This is a show filled with rot and dilapidation, insanity and dereliction. It’s big, ambitious, immersive, complex and very, very good.
It’s not Nelson’s first time at Modern Art Oxford. He was last here in 2004, with a crumbling shack in the process of being swallowed by desert dunes. The shack is back, rebuilt in the same gallery, as if it never actually left – just temporarily blinked in and out of temporal existence.
But it’s different now, more weathered, more broken. And that vast pile of sand is different too – you can see that it’s not a real dune, it’s a thin layer of sand held up on carpets and a rusted metal frame. The whole thing is an illusion.
It always was, we just couldn’t see it. He’s recreated his old studio in the first gallery too, but stripped of the ephemera and materials that make up an artist’s work space. Now it is largely empty, its shelves bare.
A projector flips through slides of self-portraits next to a broken mirror and a human skull. Nelson is feeling pretty damn self-reflective, clearly. Returning to the site of an early major exhibition 22 years later he’s taking stock, asking what has changed.
And the answer is not very much. When he first built that desert shack, it was back in the early days of the Iraq war. He was dealing with ideas of power, destruction and protest, and hoping desperately for change.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
