_Bio Michael Love attended both the University College of the Fraser Valley and Emily Carr University of Art + Design and received his MFA in photography from Concordia University in 2009. He was a founder and co-curator of Gallery 295. In addition to his artistic production, Love is also an arts educator at the University College of the Fraser Valley and Emily Carr University.
_Approach Love’s work is invested in research of history and conflict. The philosopher and historian Susan Buck-Morss describes the effect of media images leaving viewers in a constant state of shock; she champions synesthetic, an “aesthetic system of sense consciousness” that restores the original meaning of aesthetics, to perceive by feeling, and to see the world as a shared nervous system. — Love pulled away from the traditional use of photography, and instead used digital collage to create new pieces. This use of collage has allowed the artist to explore architectural language and ideas through the juxtaposition of various architectural styles and forms, creating new possibilities for dialogues around the built environment. Interested in historical narratives, Love’s practice has been devoted to the documentation and unpacking of various sites related to the Cold War. Love is interested in the remains of this conflict as indicators of human potential and failure.
_Project Love uses photography as a means of recording and understanding both the historical, and the repurposed uses of these significant sites. The images reveal traces of their Cold War past and draw together their politically-charged origins with their current states of use or decay. From fallout shelters in Canada, a children’s camp established by Lenin in Crimea and among others, bunkers built by a paranoid government in Albania, the legacy of this struggle has left its mark physically around the globe. The underlying themes of control and aggression in Love’s subject matter, aim to construct visual representations from what remains. Seeing the work of various locations Love has photographed, will allow the viewer to draw some of the same connections which he will be producing with the new images.
