mike nelson live

This weekend i have decided to see "coral reef " by mike nelson.
 I wrote about him a while ago but never had a chance to see it by myself.

I must say that that the labyrinth works perfectly.
You can easily lost in these space, as you are entering separated rooms, but also you are fallowing a path, a corridor, that not necessary can lead you to the exit.
Entrance is found, not without a trouble, but exit? No. This can take a while, as there is another trick; first room that you enter and you remember as the first in the sequence, is repeated, so you might think that you are heading towards the exit while it lead you to another, sort of storage room, in which i wasn't sure is it a part of the exhibition or not.

  To prove that i decided to draw a map of the whole space while I was there.
It was quite difficult, as you are submerged in a real labyrinth of corridors, doors that lead to something and not, distracting interiors..
  It didn't help me to understand the installation better, i think the key is to sort of give a chance to be lost for a moment.. of course to be lost but not really, as we know that we are in Tate and we will get out for sure, i think to be lost in this world of situations and places that are hung in a waiting rooms. Maybe something more will happen here? Or maybe nothing and no one will come and we should leave..?

 

  Using a jumble of apparently discarded everyday materials, such as timber, furniture, magazines and clothing, Nelson constructs large-scale, highly architectural, site-specific installations that often arise from a period of living and working in a particular location. In them he fuses literary, filmic, socio-political and cultural references, both associated with and imposed upon the site, to create haunting environments which evoke strange and disturbing narratives.

 

It lures the viewer through a labyrinth of shabby interconnected rooms, abandoned, inhospitable spaces in which disquiet and disorientation is evoked.

 

   These spaces all have the character of generic waiting or reception rooms, but particular identities become apparent through different ethnic and cultural decors and details, an empty sleeping bag, an Islamic calendar, a wall hanging of JFK, a smashed chair. Individual characteristics and cultural histories unfold and narratives accumulate by association.

 

 A places that people have vanished from like the Mary Celeste, or where a crime has been committed, where something awful has happened or is about to happen. Nelson's arrangement of his materials is never arbitrary, but carefully crafted and organised, in an idiosyncratic way, to create his new fictions.

By the choice of materials he is giving us the clues of what happened or is about to happen in a particular space, who is staying here, what sort of thing that person is doing, even what is thinking..

  I think that this could be the key to my work, to create such an illusion that the viewer wouldn't know is it reality, or is it a part of the path or not.
 

 

  Mike Nelson was born in Loughborough in 1967. He studied at Reading University from 1986-90 and went on to complete an MA in Sculpture at Chelsea College of Art & Design, London, in 1992-3. Nelson won first prize in the Economist Summer Show in 1993 and was subsequently selected for BT New Contemporaries touring exhibition. He had his first solo exhibition, Charity Shop, at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow in 1994 and since then has had nine further solo shows in the UK and Europe, the most recent of which, The Coral Reef, was at Matt's Gallery, London, in 2000. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions both nationally and overseas and last year exhibited three different works at Southampton, Cardiff and Birmingham for the British Art Show 5.