Mike Nelson: Magazine

Mike Nelson makes fictional architecture. He builds installations out of wood and punctuates them with Chinese decorations, old posters for the movie Alien , motorbike helmets, stuffed birds, plug sockets, arcade machines, and a mounted stag’s head left out in the rain until most of the skin rotted to reveal the skull. He creates stage sets, emotionally charged false buildings within buildings, rooms and corridors that are self-contained, with ceilings. He induces déjà-vu, claustrophobia, nameless anxieties, fantastical narratives, monstrous confusion. Like moving through William S. Burroughs’s Interzone , wandering through one of Nelson’s installations is a trip between states, between readings, between questions of where we are and whether we have been here before. Paperback, 7.5 x 10 in., 400 pages, 400 color illustrations