In 2005, I collaborated with poet and artist Christine Choi to create an epistolary installation for the Valentine’s Day show Crushin’ at the alternative art space Texas Ballroom in Chicago, Illinois. We explored the forms of love letters and greeting card sentiment, creating “universal” letters about situations that rarely had their own Hallmark cards: brief encounters, internet stalkees, emotionally difficult lovers, and so forth.
We each wrote ten letters and asked acquaintances to handwrite the text to give each letter a unique sense of character and enhance the display. This also set up the tension between standardized, formulaic sentiment and the immediate, personal emotional quality of one’s handwriting. Each letter’s addressee and signer were left blank so that a potential consumer could insert their own relevant names. The finished pieces were displayed on a wall, each letter labeled with suggested occasions or appropriate relationships, such as "perfect for: long-distance relationship; relationship with a jerk," and were arranged on a wall for folks to take down and review, in a manner like this:
