Everybody Deserves Love, Even You (2004-11) by multidisciplinary artist Lynne Heller
LEITMOTIF: Artists Experiment in Public Space | an Independent Project Produced for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2011
Exhibitions in Cube-Box rental trucks transform Parkdale into a hybridized landscape!
Curated by Stuart Keeler | Parkdale Village BIA | October 1, 2011 - Dusk to Dawn! - in participation with Fly by Night, The Gladstone Hotel
Everybody Deserves Love, Even You is an interactive installation in which poetry created from promising and sly found text from thousands of spam emails is projected onto garbage bags piled on the curb of Toronto's Queen Street West.
Particularly manipulative and passive-aggressive, the title, "Everybody Deserves Love, Even You", was the subject line of an email. Its despondent tone addresses contemporary cultural vulnerabilities, sadness, yearnings and desperation upon which marketers prey.
The most poignant contemporary reminder of the gap between what is real and ideal is the internet, where one spends nightly hours on personal searches; and advertisements flutter, pop up and highjack concentrated and intimate moments. All spam is about personal allure, the attainment of beauty, love, power or wealth. Everybody Deserves Love, Even You imitates the endless variation of these virtual promises. Various spelling tactics are employed so that recipients understand the message but computer programs do not. The messages are concocted in endless variations: often funny, always bizarre, and occasionally poetic. Reminiscent of the seductive murmur of a foreign language, a sexualized computer voice whispers the text. The overly modulated and controlled cadence emphasizes the pervasiveness and monotony of spam, while at the same time, characterizing and transmogrifying the text.
By taking on a feminist strategy of using alternate surfaces, claiming disregarded sidewalk and garbage, the work focuses viewers' attention on spaces and concepts that are often neglected and taken for granted. In a third wave feminist twist, the obnoxious is 'made pretty' through playful colour: co-opting the mostly 'male' oriented spam spewings.
The projection mimics the location and orientation of Toronto street lights, reminding viewers of their reliance on these beacons of safety, warmth and harbour. People waiting for the streetcar huddle together under the beams of bright light, protected from an unknown night. Shadows are fright; whereas light is a virtual space of shelter. As the night remains mysterious and untamed, city streetlight offers a sense of security, visibility, and friendliness, a place of social gathering and a space of waiting, yet it is also, paradoxically, a means of surveillance and imposition. Light exposes as much as protects in this topography - garbage and junk-mail.
Viewers bathe in the light, and their interaction triggers the projection's movement, inducing a sense of spotlight and performance, and therefore a feeling of love and attention. The light touches viewers specifically and personally, and is at the same time, mass-produced and mass projected. Mimicking the glow from computer screens, the work deflects and co-opts bottom of the barrel strategies used by virtual marketers into a joyful moment that straddles the real and the virtual. Everybody Deserves Love, Even You emphasizes the seemingly permanent ubiquity of spam as a shared experience and universal language -words that are largely ignored but still imbued with the power of omnipresence.
Text written by Anastasia Hare and Lynne Heller, 2011
Anastasia Hare holds a BFA in Art History and Studio Art from Concordia University and an MA in Art History with a diploma in Curatorial Studies from York University. Currently, Hare is a member of the board of directors of Studio Béluga, Montreal.
Lynne Heller is a post-disciplinary artist and educator. Her interests encompass material culture, new media performative interaction, graphic novels and sculptural installation. Heller completed her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004 and is currently teaching at the Ontario College of Art and Design University. Heller is currently a PhD candidate at SMARTlab, University College Dublin. http://lynneheller.com/
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