Love is particles. Love is multiplicity. Love is everything. Love makes no sense. Love is felt, but can never be fully apprehended. Love is polysemic. We mold its definition to make our lives make sense. Love is pure generosity and empathy. Love is cruel tyranny. Love really makes no sense. Love rules our lives and it’s the drive that makes us strive.
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We do everything in the name of love, but love lasts just seconds, maybe minutes; then love changes. Love is temporary. Love is pure chance. Love is relative. Love isa pencil drawing a random line guiding us. Love is structureless stories creating incalculable abstract figures in our lives. Yes, love is infinite – but we need to make the most of it because it probably won’t last forever.
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Love is a product of chance.
Love inevitably transforms us.
Love always multiplies us.

This series was initiated as a prompt from New Projects around the theme “Audacious America”. Much of the imagery comes from economic expansion era pop culture and post-civil war publications. The series as a whole is a play on the foundations of modern inequality as a result of both periods: the failed promises of confiscation/redistribution after the American Civil War, and the myth of the American dream during the golden age of capitalism. Funds raised will go to the Coalition for the Homeless.

I Love New York But I Live In Denver is a series of collages made during a seventeen-day visit to New York City in February 2020. This time entertained my infatuation with a place I read and fantasized about as a young artist. Stories of my 1980s heroes, Basquiat, Haring, and Warhol, and their ventures in the city read again as I developed a new physical connection to a place. Like many artists before me, I’ve dreamt ofliving and working in New York. The “New York Dream” embedded into my psyche from childhood memories of my parents hosting house parties, turning our living room into a makeshift dance club blasting Grandmaster Flash, Sugar Hill Gang, and Kurtis Blow over the speakers. Seventeen days was just enough time to write an optical love letter to a city that captured my attention and long enough to miss the city my roots are tied to.

All the materials used to make this series were found and sourced in New York. I mined material from East Village Books on St. Marks Place and Strands Rare Book Room on Broadway, finding books related to architecture, photography, and art history. One primary source for this series was Young New York by Ethan James Green, featuring portraits of models, visual artists, and nightlife icons taken in Corlears Hook Park on the Lower East Side. These images were deconstructed and intermixed with pictures found within the books I mined and postcards, magazines, and slide negatives collected along the way.

Michael DeSutter’s work explores familial relationships and themes related to the nature of work. Inspired by his late grandfather’s collection of vintage Fortune magazines from the 1960’s post WWII “Golden Age”, Michael set out on a four-week immersive project in which every day he would show up to his studio (work) wearing a suit and tie, carrying out the repetitive and isolating routines of a 60’s era 9–5 job as he set out creating art inspired by this theme. 

Over the four-week period plus six months during the pandemic, Michael assembled eight bodies of work including a 56 page hand-drawn chart pieced together by his grandfather William Overpeck and a collaborative sculpture made by the artist and his father. These collages played off the visual of the bar-graph, serving both as a symbol of corporate power but also a nod to his own desire to chart his own personal growth.  

Throughout the process, New Projects worked closely with Michael, supporting his inquiry, but also documenting his performative workflow. This was ultimately turned into a short film, memorializing not just the artifacts that emerged from his exploration, but the journey too, as a work of art in its own right.

I began working on Intro to Love in the middle of a global pandemic. You know the one. I was a couple months joyfully pregnant with our son and appreciating the moments of calm and quiet—the long wooded walks around the agricultural center near our house, the flexibility to stay up late watching movies with my wife. I was also in the middle of a thick and compelling grief as civil rights protests erupted around the country, and thousands were dying of this strange new sickness, and my grandmother, the only person I’ve ever known whose soul is the same shape as mine, grew tired and died too. I found at that time that writing about love was wholly necessary, and wholly complicated. Love is kindness and delight, yes, and it is also loss and fear—love is a heavy, thorough vulnerability, a guttedness, the heartbreaking beauty of a fawn sleeping in the woods, the terrible knowing that I will not be here to touch my son’s wrinkles when he is a very, very old man. And it is the thing (cliché as of course it is) that makes meaning of being alive.

It has been such a gift to my soul to work on this project alongside such talented artists and creative visionaries. In the midst of the simultaneous monotony and chaos of the last year and a half, working on Intro to Love gave me a gift I badly needed: the gift of paying attention. I hope some of these poems may come to mean something special to you, to help to remember your body and your breath and your being, to remember the people you most love. Wishing you health and warmth and happy reading.

My collaboration with New Projects started with a conversation about the objects we hold onto that bring us comfort, particularly the childhood tokens that evoke memories. No longer wanting these mementos and relics out for display, we keep them stored safely, afraid to let them go as if our memory would fade away. This conversation sparked a prompt, a physical prompt of two childhood trophies. Baseball trophies, each adorned with gold patina figures posed in action. One plaque engraved with "Most Improved (1993)" and the other with "Best Attitude (1994)".  
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Through an experimental process using black epoxy, I memorialized the memories. Typically, epoxy (in its liquid form) is poured into a mold for casting. Once it becomes a solid material, the mold is removed, and the object is hardened in a matte black. However, I discovered a new process through a series of experiments, one being a 'happy accident.' Waiting for the right moment, I slowly poured the epoxy over the trophies as it was about to cure, freezing the liquid in mid-drip. Instead of a matte black, the pour resulted in a high gloss. Each figure, coated in thick drips, appears as if they are suspended in time. Similar to the way sap hardens into amber, these memories are preserved, and the objects now begin a new life.