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Love is a funny thing, it doesn’t ever really do what it’s supposed to. As maybe the most aestheticised emotional state, it’s also the one that is most easily addressed through capitalism. What product do you buy for someone to show that you really hate them?

Love, in its many states and guises, is an emotion most easily expressed through capital. We could be talking about financial capital - how many months salary was your engagement ring? - but the economics of love are equally prominent in less corporeal spaces. We measure love in terms of sacrifice, how much we mitigate ourselves in favour of another, the thing that you would give up for ______. Love gets picked up and shaken around by capital, moulded and repurposed to have a function we’re more comfortable with explaining in contemporary parlance.

Love in the form of an infographic, ten signs your relationship is failing and why it’s not your fault. Sacrifice may be a classic language of love but today we want to see receipts. Love is agreed over regular meetings, quantitative data is required to establish the strength of your love, terms are agreed and stuck to. To deviate from this agreement is to forfeit that love, signed in advance by any involved parties.

The invasive, probing fingers of reality pull chunks out of love. They warp it, making a futile contortion forced to masquerade as a true version of itself because love has no place in reality - real, messy love is impossible to fit within the confines of modern living. Shot At Love brings together a group of artists exploring the messy potentials of love - cherished, desired, unwanted or unrequited. The love that manages to seep through the cracks of reality and create the brief opportunity for transcendent moments, the kind that frees your soul from your body for an instant or that makes you want to never leave your bedroom again. 

Working across collage, painting, drawing, photography and video - the artists included in this presentation produce a cross section of artefacts, illustrations and explorations of love as it moves in different states. The fluidity of love is emphasised, explored as it fills the unknown recesses of our psychology and opens the doors to altered states.