I Love You I Love You I Love You: I Love You Series In Art

photo: digitalcraft.org

I Love You's most natural and stable state is the series. Once it is declared, it is said over and over again. There's no going back.

Examples of art imitating life:

Kate Hollett, a Toronto artist, has a series of I Love You paintings. Hollett says, "There are so many ways to say I Love You" (Scarlett Magazine). She says it with titles like I Love You This Much, I Love You Underneath It All, I Love You Is That OK?, I Love You Hot & Cold, and I Love You To Death. She also made a video that simply showed people saying I Love You to the camera. The National Post noted, "Kate Hollett has made a career exploring the words, 'I Love You'".

Kristiina Lahde wrote I Love You on a grid of one hundred post-it notes. Curator David LaRivierre writes that I Love You is:

"a sentiment that under normal circumstances is reserved for that 'someone special'. The act of repetition imparts the obsessive nature of collecting, while effectively watering down the significance of said notes in terms of conferring any sentiment of remarkable status. Love is rendered mechanical, as schematic and grid-like as the collection itself."

The Dandy Warhols perform a song called "I Love You", which repeats those three little words fifty-six times in four minutes, twelve seconds. The chorus is monotone -- almost a mantra. And only two guitar chords!

Jacques Perconte's I Love You Campaign has logged 12 120 468 displays of I Love You as of this writing. The web art project is dedicated to the artist's girlfriend and was launched on Valentine's Day, 2005. He explains:

"This is a concrete and scientific way to know as precisely as possible how much love is streamed online and more important how much love is contained in this work. Every time a picture is displayed and the code modified by love messages, the counter is updated. The more time goes, the more love grows…"

You may not consider the act of virus writing an art, but virus creators call themselves "virus artists". Over three million copies of the I Love You Virus were sent and received. Virus artists liken their art to graffiti ... taken to a whole different level of exposure.

Know any artists that have created I Love You's in series? Please let me know!