OPERATION LOVE LETTER

CalArts, MFA Mid-Residency Exhibition, 2024

An animated sequence from a playable Endless Falling Game, Operation Love Letter (Portrait of a Paramour) stages its own perverse spectacle of birth, lust, obsession, and decay. Set to a Baroque funeral dirge and narrated by the disembodied voice of Hollywood’s long-deceased archetypal sex symbol, the work is suspended in the production of desire – the in-betweenness of infatuation without the catharsis of a face-to-face. Time and space are compressed. Objects are simultaneously taking shape and being riven apart. Digital avatars of paratroopers, sourced from a campaign-based military FPS (first-person shooter), are Frankensteined into electrical currents, clouds, and blobs. We are gorged on the corrosive sweetness of late-capitalism’s synthetic portrayal of modern romance.