For Love Letter, hand-embroidered handkerchiefs were dropped in Paris and New York in 2011 as part of the exhibition Revision Peripherique at Projective City Gallery in Paris.
Love Letter: An Exchange of Pleasure and Pain was a collection of site-specific works embodying gestures of intimacy between the cities of New York and Paris. Residents of each city were asked for striking, sensory recollections of the other: sights, sounds and smells that left an indelible, lasting impression in their minds. The resulting texts, in both French and English, were edited to essential phrases and sewn by hand to vintage handkerchiefs in 14 pt typeface. Each handkerchief bore 2 to 4 phrases contributed by different people that together functioned like a poem: between the lines a subtext emerged, creating an entirely new portrait of a place beyond the memory descriptions themselves.
In homage to the antiquated ladies’ practice of dropping handkerchiefs for favored suitors to pick up, the finished pieces were left out in the streets of Paris and New York for random passers-by to collect, decode and keep (pieces in Paris with words by New Yorkers were in English; Parisian hankies in New York were in French). In this way, they functioned as gifts—flirtatious initiations of contact between distant strangers.
