Love story

2012, animation and drawings: ink on paper.

Sound design by Alice Hui-Sheng Chang.

The work consists of 12 different versions of a love story. Each version is made up of the same shots, the order is simply rearranged and the sound track changes. Each piece may stand on its own as a narrative but together they discuss the nature of how romance is most often represented.

Of all popular narrative forms, the romance is perhaps the one we experience most poignantly and personally. Regardless of whether we have or have not felt intense feelings of romantic love, we live in a culture where we are encouraged to yearn for it, through everything from chocolate commercials to music videos. Yet despite the emphasis upon the individual’s experience of romance, the tropes themselves are familiar to a point that verges on the hackneyed, resulting in a constant retelling of the clichéd binaries that fling figures together – and, just as often, that tear them apart. Heller-Nicholas’ work engages explicitly with the faceless anominity of popular romantic narrative forms and figures, reminding us that while love stories appear to cover a rainbow of emotions – anger, joy, pain, passion and many more – the reality of how these stories are told more often than not relies on a monochromatic understanding of fictional representations of contemporary romance.

Exhibited as part of Southern Panaramas, 18th International Contemporary Art Festival, Videobrasil, Brazil. More information available online.