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February 22, 2013 – Review
Camilla Løw’s “Spring Rain”
Matthew Rana
![](https://images.e-flux-systems.com/aa_2013_02_1_Elastic-Camilla_Low_Spring_Rain-2.jpg,1600)
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 …