Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons
Juice and I went to the Hayward Gallery to see Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons.
My intent has always been to make immersive works. They should have a narrative, a spatial aspect, but also a psychological effect on the senses: you’re seeing and feeling one thing whilst your brain is trying to override this and tell you something else.
Mike Nelson
Here’s the wall of text at the entrance:
Throughout his career, Mike Nelson has scavenged materials and objects from reclamation yards, car boot sales and charity shops to build expansive, atmospheric installations that transport us.
He has transformed decommissioned relics of industry into large, striking sculptures and made memorial-like works from sleeping bags and rubble. This exhibition brings together a selection of these works from the past three decades, reimagined and reconfigured for the spaces of the Hayward Gallery.
The highly detailed installations that Nelson builds are uncanny – speculative representations straddle the line between real and fictional worlds. The various objects and built elements in these works convey a lively sense of disorderliness, enveloping and haunting us with intimations of absent characters. In the ruggedness of their materiality as well as in their range of references, they suggest the possibility of violence, disaster and societal decay.
Together, these characteristics encourage us to actively look for clues and to seek connections between the many details that we encounter and explore. They also invite – indeed compel – us to experience feelings of ambiguity, eeriness, suspense and disorientation. In Nelson’s constructed realities, time is an otherworldly concept and truth is an unreliable beast.
I hadn’t heard of Mike Nelson before this, though I think I had seen a photograph of the desert installation.
As the text describes above, Nelson aims to make his work ‘immersive’ or sees his work as being immersive work. I understand what he means by the idea of creating these fictional locations and how it can be used to indulge an observer. The idea of virtuality in his work. Transferring this to the virtual domain, it makes me think of this:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/540510/ISLANDS_NonPlaces/
Islands NonPlaces is an ‘interactive artscape’
I really like the monochromatic lighting and its stylisation with low poly assets in this project. I was thinking of this as a source of inspiration for our VR project as I think it would be really good as a style to our VR project.
but back to the exhibition….
I don’t really know I feel about it as a whole. There were parts I liked.
Red rooms.
In my room in student accommodation last year I replaced my light bulb with an RGB smart light bulb, mostly so that I could have the light a bit dimmer as it was too bright otherwise. When listening to some music I would change the light to go with the music. That’s what these red-lit rooms made me think of, listening to My Bloody Valentine with the lights turned pink.
The door maze
I enjoyed aspects of this, the maze kind of structure. I think it would be an interesting experience as an individual, to stumble across such space in day-to-day life, but socially, in the space of a public gallery, it didn’t give me the intention that was perhaps intended. I think we spent as much time queuing inside the exhibition as we did exploring the space, like some theme park rollercoaster.
The ‘disorientating’ idea of going through doors and hallways more often ended in awkward, somewhat humorous interactions with other visitors of the space. Unless the ‘uncanny’ evocations were aimed at the gallery experience, I’m not sure how successful this was.
I’ve grown up around farming machinery kinda things so took some photos of this stuff for my Mum/Stepdad and Dad. I guess by putting them in a gallery you can appreciate their aesthetics, while also making a comment on industrialisation and the UK’s history of the post-Thatcher industrial sector. Made me think of the Abbey Pumping Station Museum in Leicester.