Mike Nelson's exhibition at Modern Art Oxford recreates the English artist's studio, shacks and sand dunes in deliberately deteriorated form, presenting what the Guardian describes as "entropy and hopelessness" made confrontational through immersive installation.
The show features a rebuilt version of a crumbling shack Nelson first exhibited at the venue in 2004. The structure now appears more weathered and broken than its earlier incarnation. It sits alongside a vast pile of sand that appears to be a natural dune but is revealed as an illusion: a thin layer of sand held up on carpets and a rusted metal frame.
The Guardian's reviewer characterizes the exhibition as Nelson working at his "most frustrated, scared, introspective and personal," filled with imagery of rot, dilapidation, insanity and dereliction. The scale is ambitious and complex. The recycling of the 2004 shack creates a temporal doubling effect, as though the structure "never actually left, just temporarily blinked in and out of temporal existence."
The critic notes the significance of seeing the sand pile's construction exposed: "The whole thing is an illusion. It always was, we just couldn't see it." This suggests Nelson is deliberately puncturing the viewer's initial immersion by revealing the scaffolding beneath the artwork.
Modern Art Oxford is currently hosting the exhibition.