LOVE, a project devised by artist Mairi Lafferty in 2010, culminates with the launch of a fold-out poster journal tomorrow (2 February) at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA). The journal follows a series of email invites sent out over a four-week period in November and December 2012 to promote online videos by the artist. Edited versions of these videos are on display at the DCA LAB (until 7 February) and mark the conclusion of a two-year research project by Lafferty into Dundee’s Tayside House, which is in the process of being demolished.
LOVE // L // The Beckoning Hand from Mairi Lafferty on Vimeo.
The journal is the 34th in an ongoing series by Glasgow-based not-for-profit project Victor & Hester, currently run by artists Amelia Bywater and Emma Fitts. Since 2010 they have used the written journal to collaborate with artists and explore relationships between textual, performance and visual art practices.
“We work with artists through a series of monthly events and journals,” explains Fitts. “The journal series acts as a multiples project that shifts and changes for each new period of production and the environment in which the work is being generated or presented. A key element to the project is collaboration and the social spaces that are created with each launch.”
Lafferty says: “Borne out of nostalgic and obsession rhetoric built around our collective relationship with brutalist architecture, LOVE and its published counterparts, interrogates and mirrors the fine line between admiration and obsession in order to explore Utopian ideals. The project was initially funded by Dundee Visual Artists + Craft Makers Award Scheme in 2010 and now concludes at DCA.”
Previous Victor & Hester journals have featured artists and curators such as Hirofumi Suda, Allison Gibbs, Claire Shallcross and Fiona Short. In 2012, three journals were produced to coincide with Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, in association with Aye Aye Books and Glasgow Visual Artists Award Scheme.
