Eat Love is a consumable sculpture comprised of 958 candy hearts, each hand-stamped in edible ink with the phrase “i love you.” Presented in a glass bowl as an offering, viewers are invited to eat a candy, thereby participating in the literal consumption of love. The diminishing amount of candy provides a parallel to the degradation in quality of the photocopies.

Collectively, the installation considers how meaning is derived from romantic declarations, and whether or not such meaning can be preserved and valued when those proclamations are repeatedly performed. The work questions the greater motivation behind romantic declarations after such acts have already been monumentalized: do we repeatedly perform them because meaning can be continually derived from them, or because they have become a standard way of performing in relationships?

Installation views, Love in Translation, XPACE Cultural Centre, Nov/Dec 2011