People We Love

An invisible transaction of love

Beautiful, moving and timely, People We Love explores the invisible transaction between a person, a piece of art and that emotion which bonds us all. Love.

Five, floor mounted, high definition screens, set in the York Minster, exquisitely lit, they show a portrait of a York citizen.

Each person is gazing at a picture of someone they love. A picture you never see. Feel each unspoken story as the faces tell the tale of a person they love.

Viewers of People We Love will meet the penetrating gaze of the work’s subjects, never knowing who the focus of their detailed attention is. In the most direct sense, the aesthetic subjects of the installation, i.e. the people we love, are absent, and can only be conjured into existence through an act of imagination on the viewer’s behalf. The work turns on this notion, the notion that love and empathy start as an act of imagination. 

Kit Monkman from KMA explores this further in his blog An Invisible Transaction of Love. People We Love finds its inspiration in the book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. First published in York in 1759, the book contains a blank page for the reader to imagine, draw or write about a person they love. To learn more about how this groundbreaking book inspired People We Love read The blank page and to read more about viewers adopting the role of both the artist and the artistic subject in his blog The artist & the viewer.