Lovesick: The point when you love so much that it makes you sick. It’s the sentiment wrapped up in the affection of words like “love you to pieces,” “I just want to eat you,” and “my baby”. At times it is obsessive; at times it is overly sentimental. It is sometimes embarrassing and sometimes confounding. Mostly though, it is simple, true love: loving someone so much it makes you feel sick. Lovesick is the love that makes no sense and all sense at the same time.

Lovesick brings together the work of two Columbus based artists, Emma Kindall and Cat Mailloux. Their art practices explore their personal family history, both in the past and in the present. Their work softens the trauma of mental illness, sickness, strained relationship and loss, sugar coating reality, making it easier to swallow.

In Kindall’s work, magic and reality meet in collages, cobbled together sculptures, hand-made books, and tentative animations. She collects and salvages from the detritus of her family, scavenging from photographs, hand-written notes, home videos, text messages, letters, and poems to build a patched together narrative of her past and present familial relationships. It is a semi-fictional commentary that draws a thin veil over heartbreak.

Using language, drawings, and sewn forms, Mailloux declares love to her dying father, heralds the bravery of her Madonna-like mother, and maps and documents the grief of her sisters. Cheerful colors, care-free patterns, and peculiar language soften the underlying seriousness of heartbreak and heartache.

Lovesick will hover in the dualities of love: woundedness and warriorness, tenderness and cruelty, vulnerability and callousness; at once intimate and removed. Tinged with a certain desperation, it will, bringing together text based work, collage, sculpture, and animation to form a who whose locus is grief, suffering, and mourning intermixed with a longing for magic and miracles; grounded in a deep, ever present love.

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Our Opening Reception for  "Lovesick" is Saturday evening, April 6, 6-10pm. Free and open admission to the public during the Short North's December Gallery Hop.

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