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Flash (2009) - Flash shows an array of flashlights emerging from behind a grey back projection screen. It leads us to the age-old and larger than life forum of human desire for an absolute or finite kind of meaning. Pragmatically speaking, however, Akselbo’s forum here is the sport arena from which thousands of flash lights suddenly go off to capture the moment of some great achievement. It’s the great desire for the quintessential moment, for significance, which given the numbers of lights really cannot be that unique. Yet the aspiration is relentlessly there, and in the end the different patterns of illumination reveal the lines of a drawing that brings us to one of the most epic single moments of our Western civilisation, Michelangelo’s depiction of God’s hand reaching for Adam’s. So we effectively arrive from not much to a short history of everything in a flash, literally or from a shot in the dark to most enlightening circumstances linking the smallest possible blimp to an image of existential coherence.

Akselbo tabs into the pool of visual details and special effects of Hollywood, television and art history. Half-forgotten sequences that floataround in the back of the mind of the viewer are picked up by Akselbo and recontextualized in the form of kinetic sculptures and installations.

As signs and symbols in their own right, the performative sculptures involve the viewer in a dialogue with the broader visual culture that reverts visual cliches and narratives into a new language of sculpture.

Often stirring the imagination towards the humorous, poetic and fantastic, everyday objects can suddenly change the perception of reality and provide a cinematic perception of reality.

A coffeemug rests on the windowsill. The coffee is cold but the surface shows ripples of motion from an unseen force. Perhaps this will give you a flashback to the scene in Jurrasic Park where you see the rythmic ripples in a glass of water signifying the hord of dinosaurs on the loose? Or is it the possible dangers of an earth quake showing its face?

A pin-up poster from the mechanics workshop attracts the eye, only to respond to your look by lifting up its pins and slowly putting them back into place.

Selfconscious? From the dustbin you hear a rustle and out the corner of your eye you see something moving in the scrabs of trashed paper. Is it the guilty feeling of an unpaid bill or the guilty feelings of a trashed loveletter? Or a mouse having a ball in your trash?

See more works under 'Exhibitions'