AGENZIA

Pachinko is very pleased to present Camilla Løw’s AGENZIA.

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Camilla Løw studied on a course in Glasgow called “Sculpture and Environmental Art”, where the credo was that context is half the work. She has said that what drew her to the city was a scene in which art and design were treated as one thing. She has made hanging sculptures that double as its lighting, a day bed that doubles as a sculpture, public sculptures designed to wear, and shown in the company of Ettore Sottsass. The Italian architects and designers of that period, like Memphis in its short and noisy run in the early eighties, produced furniture with no interest in being tasteful and objects that were not in either camp.

“Only by decomposing the product does consumption give the product the finishing touch”¹

Camilla Løw’s AGENZIA consists of wax shapes with wicks in shades of reds, greens and greys, cast by the artist and set on structures of metal. On the opening day of the exhibition, the wicks will be lit – starting the sculptures’ self-consumption.

The series of sculptures that form AGENZIA is the artist’s first attempt at using candle wax; a material both familiar and unfamiliar to her. Løw’s works often incorporate the industrial and the domestic simultaneously, and the wax is no different. It is a household stock, bought both for its usefulness and its visual appeal. When cast into blocks, it gets into the same ambiguous territory as many of Løw’s works: practical, yet a little too formal to just be pieces of utility.

The title AGENZIA was chosen because of Pachinko’s shop-front space. In Italian the word means “agency”; a place where matters are handled on the consumer’s behalf. In English, it may also suggest the capacity to act. Løw’s public works have been described as spatial agents, objects that act alongside their environment year by year. While these sculptures will transform in dialogue with the gallery space, they keep a shorter clock.

– Gribb Heinrich

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¹ Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1857–58), trans. Martin Nicolaus