In this year’s special issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s Best of the Bay, Artists’ Television Access won in the Editors Picks – Arts and Nightlife category “Best Reason to Ditch Netflix”!
http://www.sfbg.com/specials/best-bay-2010-editors-picks-arts-and-nightlife
We like telling stories—girl meets girl; girl loses girl; girl wins girl back. Or girl learns that heartbreak, like love, changes everything. Love Story Machine endeavors to explore relationships between people and language, to work intuitively with our instincts to organize the universe, and to embrace the great abstraction that unifies us all—love. This installation is a collaboration between The Margarita Club (Allyson Seal, Bailey Smith & Elspeth Stowell) and the larger community.
The project asks participants to create a card for the catalogue that explicates a personal love story in a brief but evocative manner. The format of the card mimics the style of card found in the outmoded card catalogue. Once the story is written and titled, each participant is asked to categorize his or her narrative using the Dewey Decimal System. The goal is to amass a substantial collection of vignettes that map out our collective humanness.
The collective believes that we can accomplish more together than we can alone. Community and collaboration are ecstatic occasions. Both provide organic structure, boundaries composed by all players. Art and community create a place of incandescence even as it is heartbreaking, alienating, a vast landscape without a map.
Showing alongside Love Story Machine is a solo work by Margarita Club member Allyson Seal, titled Pardon My Vernacular. Seal revels in the disturbance inherent to a good story, in the disequilibrium between two people, between many people. This unbalance promises the moment of crisis, where one thing becomes another. Pardon My Vernacular is an attempt to explicate that landscape, appropriating scientific and mathematical graphs for her own ends.
“I work as a graphic designer and recently I was asked by a client to add an American flag to their website. In their minds, this über-American symbol would infer a sense of legitimacy, security, and safety, thus encouraging their customers to give them money online. (The irony however, was that they had just been bought by a British parent company.) Politicians and news stations employ a similar strategy: by asking a designer to invent for them a connection to our historic past, they invoke the American brand for their own purposes.
“And it occurred to me that these symbols which convey ‘America’ are just simple colors and shapes, like any others at my and everyone else’s disposal. It takes very little to invoke the American brand. As design tropes, navy blue and cherry red stars stripes eagles airplanes anything really — are sickening in their ubiquity. I know I generally tune them out. However, their consistent overuse only makes them more deserving of deeper research into their form and function, content and context.”
Jessica Miller is an artist who lives and works in San Francisco. For more information, please visit: http://www.jessicamillerworks.com