The Museum of I Love You So Much Curated by Hannah Tishkoff

The Museum of I Love You So Much is a place. We know it exists, we’ve been there. We collect notes, rocks, keepsakes, screenshots and souvenirs because they carry the aura of something important – we want to be able to return. These items live for free in the museum. 

There is an inherent and somewhat devastating tension between life as it is lived and life as it is historicized. The western museological tradition stands tall as one of the greatest artifacts of the pathological human impulse to remember in an organized way. Life is not only made up of words and things, it necessarily includes affects and sensations that refuse categorization.

 We know that everything we love cannot be systematically apprehended because reality is in fact wild and uncontrollable. The museum, hungry for rationality, narrative and closure, sits there impotent. But these same futile urges also produce the comforting sense of legitimacy and protection against time that the museum offers. The museum I am imagining here exists everywhere and always in the hyper-present like a whisper, vapor, or pollen swirling in the air. 

I’m living in the MoILYSM, so when I’m driving to work and I hear Stevie Nicks bellow time cast a spell on you, but you won't forget me, it sounds like a prophecy. My sense of past, present and future is collapsing and expanding like an accordion. The same spotify generated radio station that brought me “Silver Spring” starts playing “Junk” by Paul McCartney – Parachutes, Army boots/Sleeping bags for two/Sentimental jamboree/ "Buy, buy"/Says the sign in the shop window/ "Why, why?"/Says the junk in the yard/ Candlesticks, building bricks/Something old and new/Memories for you and me. I try hard not to include the entire song but I do want everything to be included. 

Each piece presented in MoILYSM is imbued with the love and energy of its use. Stone Tape Theory, popularized in the Victorian era by thinkers such as Charles Babbage, presupposes that elements in the physical environment are capable of recording and storing human thoughts and emotions. This is closely associated with psychometry, which purports that it is possible to glean extra-sensory information through contact with physical objects. Babbage is widely considered to be the father of the modern computer. He writes:

Every atom impressed with good and with ill retains at once the motions which philosophers and sages have imparted to it mixed and combined in ten thousand ways with all that is worthless and base.… the air we breathe is the never-ending historian of the sentiments we have uttered.

The MOILYSM tracks what exists sensorily, emotionally and temporally between brain and object for the purpose of establishing art as evidence of life. The work here is unified by a shared engagement with the tension between handicrafts and technologies, the spirit of collage (it is the act of choosing things to be in a group that makes them important), collecting and personal archiving habits, and a sense of stewardship of ordinary materials.

The items exhibited here endeavor to draw our attention to the aura and aliveness that brought them into being in the first place. Time cast a spell on you, but you won't forget me. "Why, why?"/Says the junk in the yard. MoILYSM privileges a sympathetic response over an intellectual one. The artist's mobile in the window tilts towards the sun, containing a delicate balancing act of various items submitted as “artistic refuse.” Anyone is welcome to contribute. I love you so much. 

– Hannah Tishkoff