Mike Nelson is one of the more writerly artists working in the big leagues these days. His immersive installations set the stage for possible narratives that weave back and forth from reality to imagination and back again. The key characters are absent, so making your way through one of his scenarios is like navigating a depopulated history painting of the last five minutes. He's also essentially an appropriation artist, building his work out of found material that had a previous life in the world (the world world, not the art world). His materials retain the aura of their former life despite being trapped in the sealed confines of the gallery, so you can't lose that feeling of elsewhere, but without any natural inhabitants to guide you, it's easy to get lost.
Mike Nelson, Quiver of Arrows, 2010, mixed media
The Power Plant is currently exhibiting four of Nelson's creations. The biggest is a circled quartet of campers that leads you through the recently abandoned living quarters of some late 20th Century nomads, be they survivalists, immigrants, terrorists, or tourists. I was lucky enough to visit on a slow day and made my way through the dim quarters on my lonesome (the installation has a capacity of five, so expect lines if you go on the weekend). Atmosphere is Nelson's forte and he creates some here, but to what end? The challenge is to find the forest among the trees; that is, to figure out how the detritus adds up. There are patterns and echoes among the refrigerator magnets and cassette tapes strewn throughout, and hints as to who belongs to what quadrant and where they are headed, but I leave wondering if it's enough for a work of art to be a puzzle to be solved.
I'm less consterned in the next room where I find a bounty of animistic totems created from beach crap scavenged off the BC coast when Nelson worked on the first iteration of this exhibition at Vancouver's Contemporary Art Gallery. His humour and imagination are in full bloom here, along with the tinge of post-apocalyptic dread that cloaks his art of remnants. An actual death – of a friend and fellow outdoorsman – is the subject of a third work: a wall-sized repository of belongings that serves as an archive of a life well travelled. The final work relies on reproductions (literally Xeroxes) rather than actual objects, so it pales in comparison to the really real things that power the best of this collection.
Robert Burley, Darkroom, Building 3, Kodak Canada, Toronto, 2005, Chromogenic Print
Reality and artifice meet their maker in Robert Burley's documentation of the final days of photographic film factories around the world in the shadow of ever-popular digital cameras. There is an in-built mystery to these light-locked buildings and an obvious metonymic connection to all the memories, news reports, art works, and documents that were created out of what was created here. Whether intentional or not, many of these photographs resemble works by contemporary photo-based artists who have contributed to how we see the world. I see Stan Douglas in the locations in transition, Lynn Cohen in the creepy institutional interiors, and Thomas Demand in the self-referential spaces. Burley – an Associate Professor at the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University – even acknowledges his own complicity in this historic shift with a picture of the old photos studios that were hidden away where the Ryerson Image Centre now sits. Walls have become glass and, as the exhibition titles suggests, The Disappearance of Darkness now defines our visual culture.
The Power Plant: http://www.thepowerplant.org/
Mike Nelson: Amnesiac Hide continues until May 19.
Ryerson Image Centre: http://www.ryerson.ca/ric/
Robert Burley: The Disappearance of Darkness continues until April 13.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.
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Mike Nelson at The Power Plant | Robert Burley at the Ryerson Image Centre
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