The kick off for Galerie Fons Welters’ new season will be effected by Job Koelewijn. Five years after his renowned solo debut in the gallery (The World is My Oyster for which he removed a part of the gallery’s back wall creating an open hole and allowing the outside world to become part of his installation) Koelewijn presents a new installation entitled Time Machine. During the period in-between these exhibits, Job Koelewijn lived and worked in New York and participated in various international exhibitions. At the moment his work is also to be viewed in Post Nature, part of the Venice Biennial, and at the Begane Grond, Centre for Contemporary Art, Utrecht (Common Ground).
Time Machine refers to the classic sci-fi novel by H.G. Wells and also to its cult movie adaptation from 1960. The time machine, mother of all fantastic inventions, is recreated by Koelewijn in a complex installation which brings together different elements from the artists’ passed works. On a slowly rotating platform two people stand facing each other separated by a large, open screen. The environment in which they find themselves continuously alters due to their displacement vis-á-vis the screen and the space around it.
Through the use of this screen (which allows a view onto a forested backdrop) Koelewijn subtly alludes both to The World is my Oyster and his more recent mobile cinema, FilmStil – Cinema on Wheels, in which viewers can watch the outside world go by through a screen-like hole in the wall, while seated in a small movie theatre. And as with the his life sized kaleidoscope (presently to be seen in Venice), through which the spectators’ perception of reality becomes literally twisted, Time Machine carefully combines space and time, as well as reality and illusion.
[Xander Karskens]