ROLES
ASÍ ART MUSEUM
2009, Reykjavik, Iceland
In Roles, his 2009 exhibition at ASÍ Art Museum, Guðjón Ketilsson presented sculpture and pencil drawings. The sculptures are constructed of old furniture, similar to his childhood home, and other domestic objects that the artist had picked up here and there. One series of pencil drawings depict piled up personal belongings that have been put away for storage, old obsolete household objects that Ketilsson had asked his friends and relatives to bring outside their homes as if they where moving houses, then drawing them. Another series of pencil drawings depicts half-built houses in at that time the most current of the Reykjavik suburbs. The houses recall how common it was, after the 2008 economic collapse, to see building sites abandoned in mid-construction because of a lack of funds. Both of these drawing series became portraits, of close ones and of a nation in a period of distress.
Birta Guðjónsdóttir
Photographs: Sigfús Már Pétursson
