The
Deliverance and The Patience is a work, commissioned by Peer, installed
in a large disused brewery building on Giudecca in Venice as part of the
2001 Biennale.
Nelson builds large scale environments - theatrical, yet seemingly real,
elaborate and intensely engaging. They are also enormously time consuming
to construct. This installation was built over two months and filled an
empty 2,600 square feet space with 16 rooms, a mezzanine, and 190 running
feet of corridor.
Since his widely acclaimed installation Coral Reef at Matt's Gallery
in early 2000, Nelson has become regarded as one of Britain's most interesting
and exciting emerging artists. The extraordinary physical, geographical,
historical and architectural challenges that Venice offers both endorses
and questions the theatricality and magic that exists so strongly in his
work. As Jonathan Jones remarks, "As Nelson's architectural installations
become ever more grandiose you begin to wonder if it is his ultimate intention
to build a work of art so vast that it consumes the reality around it." It could be argued that Venice itself is an immense art work that Nelson's
hermetic yet enter-able world exists in bizarre relation to.
The title of this commission, The Deliverance and The Patience,
refers to two galleon ships that sailed from Bermuda to Virginia in the
18th Century. Like most of Nelson's work, this installation is steeped
in both literary and historical reference. The intricate scenarios he
creates are played out by his fictional constructs, but are also enacted
by the audience as we make our journey through the labyrinth.
Mike
Nelson has written:
In the introduction to Cities of the Red Night William Burroughs tells
the tale of Captain Mission and his doomed utopian colony of Libertatia
on Madagascar in the 17th Century. Had it not been destroyed by natives,
but flourished so encouraging others to establish similar communities
across the globe, Burroughs argues that the communications network of
Mission's pirate routes could have become a viable alternative to, and
undermine the capitalist, imperialist systems which continue to prevail
today.
Built into, and within, the existing three sections and mezzanine level
of the old brewery, a lattice work of rooms and corridors will be constructed.
A redundant warehouse occupies part of the first section, reaffirming
and exaggerating the building's identity. A partition wall of wood planks,
containing two doors, cuts across the space; behind the first door, one
narrative journey, through the second, another. Two worlds run parallel
to one another, sometimes alongside, sometimes leap-frogging, until they
meet at the junction of the second and third sections. Here a third route
is offered - a door to a staircase leading to the mezzanine, which offers
an overview of the exterior of the construction thereby dismantling the
original two fictions that cross, merge, and disintegrate within the physical
structure.
Others have taken this route, but you stand alone witnessing the fakery
of their fictive journeys. Behind you a third fiction unfolds...
You leave retracing your original steps, re-reading the scenario backwards
with the perspective of the third fiction fresh in your head, knowing
you are running alongside the parallel world of the other narrative.
Essay by Richard Grayson
Further images of The Deliverance and The Patience
The Deliverance and The Patience was commissioned and produced
by Peer, London, and presented in collaboration with Nuova Icona, Venice. With thanks to the construction team: Kieren Beattie and Paul Carter. Mike Nelson is represented by Matt's Gallery, London. We gratefully acknowledge the support of The Henry Moore Foundation and
the British Council.
Press
The Independent on Sunday review |
Construction work in progress, viewed from the mezzanine
Mike Nelson during construction
of
installation
|
