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.
The second feature from Portland filmmaker Nick Peterson (Yellow), Field Guide to November Days was made entirely with bikes instead of any motorized transport. Everyone working on the film biked to set and everything (including furniture) was pulled by bike (except for one trip to the coast!).