The public art outfit Creative Time has arranged for Turner prize nominee Mike Nelson to open a secret passage through a blown-out Chinese restaurant into the mysterious shell of the long-abandoned Building D of the Essex Street Market. It's a vast, forgotten space, empty except for the dense texture animating every surface: peeling paint, hanging chains, pipes going nowhere, moldy take-out menus, and plenty of rust. Bearded, barrel-chested Nelson is mostly unknown in the U.S. but ever since his first day job out of art school as a builder, he's been constructing elaborate installations at the best of the world's art fairs. Like some kind of reverse Gordon Matta-Clark, he starts each project by raiding local salvage yards for doors, timber, and flooring, and then he begins the serious labor of hammering a series of connected rooms into existence. He puts in details that suggest biker-gang clubhouses or flophouse front desks, but they're not natural history museum tableaux—visitors are free to move through the rooms.

Peter Eeley, the new curator of the Walker Art Center, first encountered the artist's work in Istanbul in 2003, and recruited Nelson for this project when he worked for Creative Time. The hunt to even find the installation led through a medina, "where you're sure you're going to be killed," and a secret door to a red-lit photo lab—where hundreds of prints were drying, shots of the trek the visitor had just completed. "He's annexed the whole neighborhood," says Eeley. "No frame tells you this is where the art starts—even when you know it's coming, it completely throws you."

Nelson's work has been called fictional architecture, and he is as likely to cite references from literature as from art history: Borges, Burroughs, Ballard. The tarot card readers and tattoo parlors that have been catching his eye in Manhattan led him to reread Ray Bradbury's Illustrated Man and toward some themes in the new work about the American need to stake everything on magic. "These sorts of modern primitives," he says in his deep-thinking, elliptical rhythm. "Reverting back to something basic. A sense of doubt. Letting your life up to chance or fate."

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