Mike Nelson, the British master of architectural immersion, invites us to sink below the surface and consider the substance of our collective nightmares. Over the recent decade, Nelson has created psychological fright-houses that have run the gamut of contemporary mise-en-scène, evoking everyday environments from the secret cells and modern caves of international terrorism to the transitory experience of Third World travel agencies, voodoo shrines, and psychic reading rooms to the banal environs of the nineties Internet café. Exactingly detailed, from the selection of a culturally-specific door handle to the perfectly weighted swing of the door, his world is one of the readymade, a fake archeology of sorts. In "Quiver of Arrows," his debut New York outing at Chelsea's 303 Gallery, the artist once again compels us to consider the political and countercultural margins of a globalized society.

Upon entering the gallery, one is confronted with a corral of leisure trailers, now defunct and mounted like trophies upon a wooden frame. A loop of four conjoined trailers circle the environs of the main space, a monument to the American dream of personal reinvention through travel. Initially designed for high-end tourism, such trailers — once the affordable preserve of the itinerant counter-culture, the American Wandervogel of the hippy and peacenik movements — have now evolved into the vehicle of choice for the Burning Man yuppie.

Inside the first trailer, the viewer finds a well-thumbed paperback by the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin siting on a table that is also littered with what appears to be the parts of an explosive device. On a low shelf in the back of the room, a wind-up plastic figurine of Uncle Sam lies broken and curiously lost. Moving through each of the subsequent trailers, other small assemblages of material signal additional narratives. A children’s early-learning poster written in Arabic shares space with a low table infested with audio cassettes scrawled with Arabic text, calls to prayer or bootleg pop music. In the next room, more familiar iconography is provided by a German film poster of a dagger-wielding Charlton Heston as a frontier mountain man, ready to ‘take on’ whatever his new world has to offer. In the final room, illuminated by the animated light of TV static, emptied Kalashnikov cartridges and American football helmets lie on the floor. A warren of makeshift plumbing, hastily arranged sleeping quarters, and assembled and seemingly incongruous shrines create an uneasy, uncanny atmosphere that seeps into the bones.

"Quiver of Arrows" continues Nelson's examination of contemporary America. Decidedly analog in both its execution and experience, it eschews the immediacy of the digital age and instead, Nelson says, asks us to "think through a vision of America, saturated with ideas of how it was, and the once-virulent ideologies suggested by writers such as William Burroughs and Wilhelm Reich." The scale of his endeavors are simultaneously excessive and engagingly intimate, whether we are versed in the specific legacies of writers such as Kropotkin or not.

Nelson describes the immense piece as a "narcissistic mirror" in which "people find what they choose to find." His narratives, he says, are rarely of the "man walks into a room, shoots man, walks out" variety. Rather they are circular and perambulatory in nature, with a host of signs soliciting us to engage with and assemble the pieces of these improbable probable worlds.

"There is a morality to what I do, but it’s open enough to allow visitors to decide," Nelson says. "The works strive to articulate banality to find its potential. What these things mean might, what they might be — the very nature of their circularity leads to more mystery. On a primary level it’s emotive, it seeks to penetrate the brain." The cumulative effect is a beguiling Brechtian immersion; we are players on a stage, yet we have no lines. Rooms become scenes in Nelson’s continuing psychogeographic fiction, with the marginalia of knowing props as its supporting actors. More than backdrops, they seek to implicate the viewer, to explore a readymade secularism constructed from the pop and political detritus of the latter part of the 20th century.

A continuing hangover nags at the mind: what exactly did happen last night, and to what extent am I history's protagonist, or willing dupe? Whether or not one chooses to engage in the intricacies of Nelson's micro-macro narratives, what is most striking is the exacting nature of the mood here — the helpless, melancholy sense that we are doomed to walk the corridors of hopeful failure, with the certainties of the young traveler giving way to the searching questions of middle-age. For those new to the work of Nelson, the installation is a must-see, providing access to one of the more unique perspectives and approaches to narrative in recent years. For those familiar with his work, it is time once again to pick up that favored novel and check in with the next chapter.