Line Bøhmer Løkken, Dry Eye – Dripping Stone

Line Bøhmer Løkken is an artist, since 2013 part of the crew of the Norwegian publishing house Multipress, whose publications always surprise with their delicacy and freedom of visual design.

Finally on show at Leporello’s, Dry Eye – Dripping Stone will animate the walls of the bookstore through July 25^th, along with a display of the author’s other publications, including Choreography with Potatoes and Flour, Wood Works, Immersed in Stone – Black Ice and Circular Exercises.

The project Dry Eye – Dripping Stone was published last summer: through light, almost transparent pages overlaid with images of natural surfaces and a human presence that discreetly interacts with its surroundings, Line Bøhmer Løkken immerses us in a visual experience that seems to have more to do with touch than with sight. Through this soft layering of images made up of light tones and silent pauses, she creates a universe that seems to function in a way similar to the accumulation of our memories.

But in this work Line makes us part of much more, passing through her involvement with what her daughter, Ylva, experienced. A few years ago, Ylva was diagnosed with a tumor around the optic nerve and lost sight in one eye, this event prompted her mother to reflect on the two gazes that photography possesses: the one related to the optical phenomenon and the one more related to the physical and material aspects, and to what James Gibson calls our haptic system, i.e. the individual’s “sensitivity to the world adjacent to his or her body.”

As the text of the 2023 exhibition at Kunstnerforbundets Gallery in Oslo reminds us, ”the fragility of relating to the world primarily through the visual has taken on new meaning for Bøhmer Løkken after her daughter lost sight in one eye a couple of years ago. This experience has also clarified her relationship with the camera as a physical extension of the body. Rather than representing and describing reality, the photographs serve as a recording of the artist’s experience within a given or possible “space.” The apparatus twists and distorts reality, creating new images of its own. With the series Dry Eye – Dripping Stone, of which these photographs are a part, Bøhmer Løkken explores the camera’s ability to generate a sense of presence in the images.”