It’s either a cry for help or a scream into the void. Whichever it is, Mike Nelson’s latest exhibition is the English artist at his most frustrated, scared, introspective and personal. This is a show filled with rot and dilapidation, insanity and dereliction. It’s big, ambitious, immersive, complex and very, very good.
It’s not Nelson’s first time at Modern Art Oxford. He was last here in 2004, with a crumbling shack in the process of being swallowed by desert dunes. The shack is back, rebuilt in the same gallery, as if it never actually left – just temporarily blinked in and out of temporal existence. But it’s different now, more weathered, more broken. And that vast pile of sand is different too – you can see that it’s not a real dune, it’s a thin layer of sand held up on carpets and a rusted metal frame. The whole thing is an illusion. It always was, we just couldn’t see it.
