If you didn’t make it to Mike Nelson’s show at 303 Gallery before it closed this past Saturday, don’t sweat it. Perhaps you recall this British artist’s masterpiece, A Psychic Vacuum, from the fall of 2007 at the old Essex Street Market. A scaled down version of this, shoved into a gallery, does not work. I was fist pumping my way to witness where this amazing artist had taken his work in the last 2-1/2 years, only to be extremely underwhelmed.

Four Airstream trailers dating from 1939 to 1968 were connected (via parts of a fifth trailer) into a square formation. Up some wooden stairs was the lone entry point. You could navigate through all four at the same time and return to your previous spot. Nelson addresses American history through the romantic ideals that were marketed and embedded with the futuristic Airstream, while questioning where the American dream is today. We know the answer to this question before walking into the gallery. Yeah yeah, America sucks, war sucks, we get it. An unexpected approach or interesting perspective to this Goliath subject was not achieved at 303.

Ducking your way through the trailers reveals the artist’s heavy-handed placement of objects. A Vietnam veteran T-shirt, a book titled The Spectacle of Death, an Islamic poster, and toys referencing cowboys and Indians are a few of the scattered items. The sense of abandonment from the forgone trailers was overshadowed by the forced fake relics off the United States list of world blemishes. Granted, Mike Nelson’s block size installation is hard to top, but “Quiver of arrows” was obviously the prequel.