Gang of Seven

A collection of sculptural assemblages made of materials collected from the North West Pacific Coast. The work revisits and expands upon themes and forms Nelson introduced in The Amnesiacs in 1997, in which a group of imaginary outsiders gather and wantonly sift through natural and cultural detritus, rearranging it and approaching dark phenomenological truths along the way. In Gang of Seven, Nelson's mythical beachcomber imagines the ocean as an intelligent entity of seemingly infinite sprawl, uncovering alien clues in the flotsam and jetsam, akin to the cosmonauts' relationship to the hallucination-inducing ocean in Stanislaw Lem's epic Solaris. These evidences of apocryphal events exist in a disjointed space between remnant and invention, and when brought together, effect the possibility for new systems of understanding.