303 Gallery is pleased to present our first exhibition of new work by Mike Nelson. It is his first solo gallery exhibition in the United States.
For ‘Quiver of arrows,’ Nelson has constructed a work from four old travel trailers. The trailers are placed nose to tail in a square formation, forming a small enclosure within. The viewer will be able to navigate the structure by walking through the work, as the trailers have been customized in such a way as to allow passage from one into another. Existing like a remnant from a confusion of past and future, a commune or an ad hoc derelict space station, the trailers are littered with the detritus of unspecified inhabitants. Each space looms heavily with the spirits imbued to inanimate objects, their peripheral position and dislocation emanating from the environments. These ghosts potentially offered ideas of change or movement that can now only be conjured by the imagination - incarcerated in the shells of their own history.
Originally designed for the leisure culture of the new era, the trailers exude a futuristic nostalgia through their outwardly formal and material features. Now tarnished and battered and with their wheels removed, their symbolic or physical mobility is rendered nil. That the trailers themselves should have offered a distinctly American version of nomadic life is now merely a recollection of the idealism and societal liberation of their time. Nelson’s Frankenstein construction reconfigures each trailer into an insular world, part of a larger constellation of time and place somewhere in a past neither completely real nor totally imagined.
Mike Nelson has exhibited internationally since 1994, including solo shows at Statens Museum fur Kunst, Copenhagen; Villa Arson, Nice; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona; Camden Art Centre, London; California College of the Arts, San Francisco; and the Australian Center for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Nelson has presented major works at recent biennials in Venice (2001), Sydney (2002), Istanbul (2003), and Sao Paolo (2004); he will also be included in the 2011 Biennial of New Orleans. In 2007, he realized his first large-scale installation in the United States, ‘A Psychic Vacuum,’ in partnership with Creative Time. He has been nominated twice for the Turner Prize, with accompanying solo exhibitions, and was included in ‘Altermodern,’ the 2009 Tate Triennial. Mike Nelson lives and works in London.