For a brief period in the mid-nineties the Amnesiacs helped Mike Nelson come to terms with loss. As a mythical biker gang shadowing their tangible cousins, the Amnesiacs built up a new world a sort of fractured ricochet from their (and his) past. Flash backs provided imagery without explanation from which to start to build. Some were of the everyday, like fire and water, whilst others pointed to previous lives and their dense libraries of received images, many never seen outside of print or projection.
Having laid dormant for the best part of a decade the Amnesiacs have returned to help build a shrine. This time their recollection is telescopic, not only are they confused in terms of personal history and received imagery but more specifically in terms of religious iconography and art history. Selecting and mixing motifs in the same way that a voodoo shrine might co-opt an everyday object and elevate it to a new totemic status the Amnesiacs attempt to offer a devotional alternative to the artist within the cul-de-sac they percieve he is in.
AMNESIAC SHRINE expands and distorts ongoing narratives within Mike Nelson’s work: with his Studio Apparatus works at Camden Arts Centre, London, 1998 and Musee d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, 2005, and with the Amnesiacs in the mid-nineties.
From: http://www.mattsgallery.org/artists/nelson/exhibition-4.php