I Love You Everywhere

The “I Love You” project is a multi media creation by artist, Kate Hollett. It Involves visual art: “I Love You” series of paintings, video: “I Love You Over & Over”, video installation: “ I Love You Too” and this website “I Love You Everywhere”.

The “I Love You Everywhere” website explores technology as a way to reach across the world to love and “touch” each other using interface technology. It attempts to expand the power of love and reach out to one another using interface technology. From a solo individual in front of a computer,a group of people at an exhibit, to everyone connecting around the world, it is simply about saying “I Love You”.

The “I Love You Too” interactive installation interacts with the video “I Love You Over & Over” promoting and inspiring participants in a group setting, to share their version of “I Love You” They can respond to someone in the video, their words are filmed and screened live. The messages will be fed live into the “I Love You Everywhere” website.

The project examines the complex and individual meanings of the words “I Love You”.
You can see people’s faces change as they say the words. Love is given as the words are released.

It is a testament to the power of words and the power of love. It is an opportunity to change our world with love and connect to each other.

Perhaps love really is the answer…

Critical Essay by Dr. Kóan Jeff Baysa

One source of inspiration for Toronto-based artist Kate Hollett’s recent oeuvre is Robert Indiana’s iconic “LOVE” sculpture, consisting of the four letters in a square with a tilted “O.” Amazingly, Indiana never registered a copyright for the original design and as a result that image was appropriated globally, and ubiquitously appeared on tourist items, book covers and postage stamps in the U.S. As a simple but loaded fragment of language, the spoken word, “love” is similarly regarded as universal and free.

A creative director by background, Hollett found an easy transition from graphic arts to painting where she depicted the phrase “I love you” in colorful and clever presentations. These striking acrylic paintings are catalogued in her two publications, “I Love You” and “I Love You, Too” spanning 1998-2002. The roots of these celebratory pieces, however, lie with lost love and tragedy. Her mother, the center of her life for many years, died after a prolonged bout with leukemia. Her New York art world premiere, scheduled for September 13, 2001, was cancelled due to the WTC catastrophe, and has not yet been restaged.

She garnered growing media attention for her original ten-minute film, “I Love You Over and Over” that deployed the loaded and resonant phrase: “I love you.” It was first presented publicly at the 2003 Detroit International Video Festival where it was selected as “Best of Show” and subsequently purchased for the permanent collection of the Detroit Museum of New Art. The film captured head shots of a wide range of individuals who were selected from sidewalks, shops, and schools, including strangers, family members, homeless individuals, construction workers and schoolchildren in Toronto. The participants were instructed to think of someone to whom they wanted to tell “I love you” and to say those words while looking into the camera lens. Each of the 250 subjects in the original film chose one of six pure color squares that would serve as the backdrop for their recording. The film itself is a remarkable recording of statements, modulated by individualized voice inflections, hesitations, facial grimaces, eye rolling, and other body gestures, with varying degrees of levity and intensity.

“I Love You Over and Over, Too” is the second iteration of this piece, in which a monitor playing a digitalized version of the original film faces a monitor that plays a fresh recording of someone saying “I love you” taken in an adjacent space. The intention was for the video version of the original film to generate an emotional response in its viewers who would then in turn be motivated to record their own vocalizations of “I love you.” In this interactive piece, these recordings, the old and the new, would be in conversation with each other through facing monitors.

Invariably, Hollett says, there is a release of emotion with these recordings. The artist provides an opportunity or situation with permission to be expressive, to reveal or release something internalized and suppressed. More often than not, this results in laughter, tears, hugs, and thanks. One person claimed to have addressed Jesus; another spoke to a deceased friend.

Working further with the elements of time and memory, the planned third version of this piece would incorporate a surveillance camera that would record and project “live” on a large wall the reactions of the various individuals watching the two opposing monitors displaying both the archived and the new recordings.

Contemporary culture is characterized by a populace bombarded with an endless stream of sensory stimuli. A recently defined category of medical conditions has been termed sensory integration disorders, in which individuals have difficulty sorting and processing multiple sensory inputs. With the sheer mass of new media advertising, television and computer monitors, the visual sense is inundated and nearly obscured by an avalanche of digitalized information. She quotes from the writings of Edward Tufte and Robert Horn on visual language as a communication tool distinct from natural languages. The physical qualities of written language in her paintings recall what Freud termed psychical reality, comprised of memory, reality, and fantasy. In Lacanian theory, mark making and writing are forms of self-imaging through which a child during its mirror-stage gains a sense of being a separate physical person and distinct psychic unit. French film theorist Serge Daney distinguished between the “visual” and the “image,” contrasting the undifferentiated visual of media streams with the specific image that refers to an off-camera “other.” The visual is merely an optical reassurance; the image holds its own despite the experiences of vision. In Hollett’s acrylic painting series, the multiply depicted phrases “I love you” are visuals compared to the images of the spoken words by the talking heads in her film and video works. The power of the recorded voice and nuanced physical gestures challenge the glyph-word shapes of the paintings and destabilize their static authority and convention.

“Framed within the philosophies of Joseph Beuys, on an expanded scale, Hollett could potentially be creating a form of social sculpture, with its environmental concerns and political commitment, along with its ephemeral and conceptual performance components. As intimate as these video clips may appear, Hollett’s projects are ultimately commentaries on the desolate “disconnect” and alienation between people in our culture. Individuals will never discover and enjoy the wonder of their vital and intimate six degrees of separation unless they truly begin communicating with one another.”