Apollo (I thought I was dying, so I went to the living room)
Jan S. Hansen 

“When constructing a building you should put a live cat between the walls, to protect from evil spirits. I was walking down the street and I saw something. I ran inside. I thought I was dying, so I went to the living room. I close the shutters, to be alone. I sit by the computer, draw lines and think about the centuries. I feel good, very good, thank you. She´s online, looking at flight tickets for an upcoming vacation, a well-deserved break. She plans to visit the place where they breed the best cats for buildings.”

Apollo is the god of sun and light. He is associated with dominion over colonists, and as a defender of herds and flocks. He is known as ‘Lykoktonos’ meaning ‘wolf-slayer’. His name is said to derive from the word ‘apella’, meaning ‘wall’, ‘fence for animals’ and ‘assembly within the limits of a square’. The Apollo 11 space mission put mankind on the Moon, expanding boundaries.

‘The Fifth Season’ is a term coined by the Danish company Drivadan, who constructs large glasshouses, for placement next to or over existing buildings, creating a so-called fifth season. This potentially enables residents to grow plants and vegetables year-round, and supply heat, light and endorphins during seasonal changes.

On view in the exhibition is a yucca palm, which the artist left outside his house for a year, leaving the plant to dry out and later freeze. The plant is a common imported houseplant in Denmark, giving off an air of a lost tourist or ex-pat, with its roots elsewhere. Also to be seen is a mummified cat, similarly dried up and decayed. The exhibition includes hardtack bread, baked with aluminum shavings and motor oil, which are placed, or hidden, inside of fluorescent lamps, in a seemingly paranoid or subversive manner. The exhibition also includes a stretched novelty Coke bottle with wolf urine- a surreal everyday object conveying territorial tendencies, dominance and natural order.

The paintings and sewn works in the exhibition place themselves between formal geometric abstraction, and a somewhat recognizable visual language close to floor plans, pixelated graphics and patterned moving blankets and quilts. The works and objects inform each other, both through concept and physicality. They trade place, value and importance with each other, discarding and adding ideas in favor of surface or content. Thereby creating a synthesis, which addresses ideas that interior and exterior rationales, frameworks and constructs are relative and debatable, or that they merely exist and are partaken in by default.

Jan S. Hansen (1980), Copenhagen, Denmark. Graduated from The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 2010.


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