Love Buttons, Love Bites series, 2008-10

Love Buttons, Love Bites series takes on love, loss, and language by flirting with the fluid parameters of public and private, prose and poem. Sale initiated this process by going public with poetic language and evocative text fragments, in the exchange of campaign-style buttons, in text printed on large aluminum signs, in text drawings on paper, and in participatory activities. The series is part psychological experiment, part collaboration with strangers, and part compulsion to elicit intimacy.

The language of Love Buttons, Love Bites was drawn from ‘found phrases’ written by an informal collective of poets. (link to list of collaborators) Fifty-one different messages comprised a loosely organized framework in which some of the text fragments work together in sets.

From a university poetry center to a jazz festival to a museum of contemporary art, seven iterations of this series have been presented in differing contexts, including Scottsdale Public Art Program; Glendale Arts Commission; Intervene! Interrupt! Rethinking Social Art Practice conference at University of California Santa Cruz, CA; Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ; Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. The project was developed while on artist residencies at Ucross Foundation, Clearmont, WY, and at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY; and received the Elly Kay Fund Award from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, AZ in 2008.