Amnesiac Hide
Mixed-media installation focusing on Mike Nelson’s continuing work with the figure of the stereotypical outsider.
- Submitting institution
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Kingston University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 32-75-1727
- Type
- L - Artefact
- Location
- The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada
- Open access status
- -
- Month of production
- January
- Year of production
- 2014
- URL
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https://www.thepowerplant.org/Exhibitions/2013/Winter/Mike-Nelson.aspx
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Amnesiac Hide (2014) was a large-scale solo exhibition commissioned by The Power Plant, Toronto, CA. It focused on Nelson’s continuing work with the stereotypical outsider–the fur trapper, the Beatnik, the mountain man, the lone wanderer, the biker, the outlaw, the pioneer– and examined how the perception of this archetype is eroded and recast in popular imagination. Nelson’s fascination with the outsider unfolds through his personal experiences while travelling; the death of his friend and collaborator Erlend Williamson; and the patterns of chance and coincidence that formed around his works to inform a series of installations – structures empty of occupants that blur the line between the fictional and the real, and unfold as carefully constructed and richly suggestive frozen narratives. Among these is The Amnesiacs – a serial work inventing and exploring the fictional historiography of the titular biker gang begun by the artist in 1996. For Amnesiac Hide (2014) it took form in multiple works brought together in one exhibition, ranging from a huge construction from five aluminium trailers, to a room of sculptures made of objects picked up from the Pacific Coast, and a ghost story told through redundant photocopiers.
Nelson references Robert Smithson, novels by the Strugatsky brothers and Hunter S. Thompson and Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up (1966). The use of narrative in contemporary art was unusual when Nelson first developed this way of working, but over the past thirty years it has been used by many artists from subsequent generations. Likewise, large architectural constructions devoid of the people that occupied them have become a trope of sculptural installation pursued by younger artists and also annexed by performance, dance and commercial galleries. In Amnesiac Hide (2014), Nelson reinstated the influence of his work more pointedly to the language of sculpture, dissecting the relationship between material and object.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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