While standing in “Spring Rain,” Norwegian artist Camilla Løw’s third solo exhibition at Elastic, a poem by American poet and essayist Charles Bernstein came to mind. “The Order Of…” was published in 1977 and is a playful meditation on issues surrounding epistemology and theoretical linguistics. Typographically inventive, it bears some resemblance to concrete poetry; words and letters shift in scale and location on the page. Although the poem could be superficially linked to the artist’s preference for concrete as a material, quite literally, what makes it relevant to Løw’s geometric sculptures are lines such as “hypostatization of space, the relations detemporalized,” and several stanzas later, vowels that scream: “gEOmEtry, rEgArdEd As ImmAnEnt.” Engaging with the shapes that underlie everyday acts of speech—from typeset to linguistic conventions, or even a matrix of pixels on a screen—Bernstein’s text contrasts the abstractions and universal patterns of structuralism with the singularity of objects as strange as a “Mozambique sombrero” or as banal as a bale of wire. What Løw’s sculptures seem to share with the poem, then, is a formal concern for grammar and the convergence of spatial and linguistic relations; a sensibility rooted in the tension between the rule and its particulars. Indeed, Løw’s frequent use of …

Fredrik Værslev’s exhibition seems to suggest that paintings are trivial; that they are—to turn a phrase—”for the birds.” Indeed, the five untitled paintings that make up the bulk of the show are rather innocuously referred to in the press release as “bird paintings,” an allusion to the manner in which they were made. Although they obliquely refer to the art-historical canon and such painterly concerns as surface, color and composition, the wooden, pallet-like paintings that occupy the gallery’s main showroom aren’t painted and bear few traces of the artist’s hand. Instead, their lacquered surfaces have been inscribed by the force of non-human actors: subtle depressions made by bird beaks and stains from ripe hawthorn berries. Initially produced for another series, the pine and larch structures were set outside Værslev’s studio before he left Norway on a trip. When the artist returned, he discovered that the planks had been used by birds, eating the hawthorn berries that had fallen on them. Fortuitously, Værslev decided to exhibit the wood as he found it—or, at least, with minimal alterations (such as attaching the steel supports on which they are mounted). As benign as the narrative seems, the paintings themselves are much less approachable, demonstrating …