Chances Are Great That A Delicacy Of Perception And Essential Truth Are Not Attainable: Rina Eide Løvaasen

To approach what is a densely layered exhibition by Rina Eide Løvaasen, an apt starting point would be to engage the mind and eye on the title for more than just a brief second. What you could extract from it is that any pursuit of wholiness regarding a matter is futile as the condition of seeing something in its whole is an abstraction and would be to subscribe to a lie. "Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole" reads a work by the late Lawrence Weiner that comes to mind here. Bouncing off those very words, it should be noted that the exhibition at hand merely is an assembled excerpt of various interconnected artworks, all belonging to a much expansive, long-term project, previously iterated rather within institutional capacity, to now fit a gallery context with whatever that could suggest. The beauty of the inherent trickery is how thorough, nevertheless, it all just appears with the otherwise white gallery space being appropriated and reformed to present a unifying immersive scenography, despite the missing parts that fall out of the edit and are out of view.

Those who are both attentive and receptive to the long and seemingly philosophical titular orchestration will find that grammatical rules of when to capitalize words in a title and when to use lower-case have been abandoned. This is a conscious choice by the artist to mark the interrelational equality between her building blocks, whether words, artistic mediums, or artworks, and stretch them beyond their conventions, within the scope of this project. That equality extends as well to what is absent. What falls between the cracks of perception, and its blindspots are of expressed interest for the artist to bring your thought to. Manifestly, her approach to expose such perceptive limitations can include using materials, like chemical compounds whose fluorescent qualities are visible with tangible effort per way of adding specific lighting conditions.

To alert and switch your inquisitive mind on, it could be said that the eight-part monumental oil painting series There Will Be Inevitable Loss 1-8 takes its cue from the expansion of the world space during our sleep, per year, and seen over a period of eight years. Consequentially, the eight canvases exponentially, in what would seem an unorthodox turn of events, will expand beyond their original form, nodding to the Fibonacci spiral.

The sculptural series of objects in The Energy Between Realms serve as memory carriers of the recent past and present and of such we must remember to tell ourselves. In Ancient Egypt Canopic jars were cut out in limestone to preserve the intestines of embalmed bodies. In the objects on view oceanic waste or radioactive waste in the form of uranium make for materials that have been melted into mouthblown glass. Three depictive shapes in limestone grace the objects and each relate to either one of three notions: consciousness (jelly fish), memory (sea horse) and perception (crosspollination between a mule and an oil pump).

If you however prefer not to concern your head with lingual mumbo jumbo or to uncover layers on layers of narratives marked by symbolism, mysticism, mythology, world history or natural science, there is luckily plenty of visual and aesthetical stimulus to keep the eyes busy in wanderlust. Like is often the case with great art, this exhibition operates on multiple levels, also one where this text is made completely redundant and can exit out of the equation. /Ashik Zaman

Rina Eide Løvaasen was born I Porsgrunn Norway 1988 and lives and works in Malmö, Sweden. Rina graduated from Malmö Art Academy with an MFA in 2015. Exhibitions include Kunsthall Grenland and group exhibitions at Skissernas museum, Lund and Havremagasinet. Her work is included in the collection of the  Public Art Agency Sweden. Awards include the Ellen Trotzig fund from Malmö Art Museum and Malmö Stad in 2016 and Gunnar and Lilly Persson's art scholarship, Ystad Art Museum, 2021.