The Power Plant is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Toronto by the renowned British artist Mike Nelson. Nelson is best known for his large-scale installations, in which visitors move through immersive spaces of his invention. The artist is creating new, site-specific work that is dramatically transforming the gallery’s space to explore the ideas of travel, the road trip and the journey, themes that are at the heart of Mike Nelson: Amnesiac Hide.
Amnesiac Hide comprises installations that appear as seemingly abandoned environments, yet imagining the unseen occupants of these spaces is central and specific to each viewer’s experience. Nelson is constructing a strange, yet not entirely unfamiliar atmosphere of desolation, abandonment and loss, connecting all gallery spaces by referencing the memory of his friend and collaborator Erlend Williamson, who fell to his death in 1996 whilst hiking in the Scottish Highlands.
Included in this epic exhibition are commissioned works such as Gang of Seven (2013), a site-specific sculptural installation produced in partnership with the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. Referencing a fictional motorcycle gang, the installation is an extension of a serial project the artist is revisiting entitled The Amnesiacs.
The exhibition also includes the new photographic work Eighty circles through Canada (the last possessions of an Orcadian mountain man) (2013), and Double negative (the Genie) (2014), another new, site-specific installation produced specifically for The Power Plant. Here, Nelson is constructing an environment to resemble a rudimentary office setting, where photocopied pages from an unpublished travelogue recalling Williamson are enlarged and pasted to the walls, offering a deeper look into the artist’s practice.
