Rubbing Eyes

Pip, pip, PIP.  Rub your eyes. In their first collaboration, Martin Jon Hasfeldt and Julie Koldby present Rubbing Eyes at Roskilde Art Association’s historic Palæfløjen exhibition space.  Through sculpture and printmaking, Hasfeldt and Koldby explore their ideas around potential, energy and time as they contribute to, and play with the evolving history and architecture of Palæfløjen. Inspired by Roskilde Art Association’s definition as being a conglomerate of multiple artistic outcomes, the exhibition explores the contrast and tension betweenthe objects as they are placed in the space. A conglomerate can be defined as a thing consisting of several different and distinct things that are grouped together. Here, different artworks are grouped together without insisting on natural links. Or what? In a search for meaning in this unstable condition, we automatically try to find connections between the works or make sense of them as we search for the logical connection, the system, or the comparison. Your view gets blurry. Rub your eyes again. The artworks challenge the rational, making the natural, unnatural and the ever changing, immovable. With the works produced in a contrast of natural and constructed materials, the exhibition continues the two artists’ studies in movement and the incomplete. We see naivety and playfulness presented in many of the works; sandcastles close to crumbling, immovable birds and a static sky in works that bring outside/in. Juggling balls sit around the space, as if each work gives us a glimpse of something that’s about to happen or a moment past, a dream standing still. The implied movement showing the fragility of these moments of tension.Ways of seeing are undoubtedly breakable, fragile, non-permanent, forever changing. Rubbing Eyes presents Hasfeldt and Koldby’s joint attempt at processing and testing binary opposites in success and failure, rise and fall, fragile and robust, and the impermanence of these states. Upward turns and falling flat.