love is…
Hardcover 450 pages. Limited Edition of 150 (+APs).
Between 2004 and 2006 the artist EJ Major undertook a mail art project which involved taking a screen-shot of each second of the film Last Tango in Paris and from each one printing a single postcard. These 7000+ postcards were then hand -delivered around London and the West Midlands over the course of two years. On the back the artist printed her Freepost Address and “love is…” Recipients were asked to respond and return the postcard as part of an enquiry, into love.
On a practical level the film has been used as an organisational framework around which to engage strangers. They remain anonymous unless they choose not to be, giving them license to respond candidly. Each postcard has its own story, in terms of its place in the narrative of the film and its journey through the hands of the recipient and subsequently the Post Office. Those that are returned then form part of a collaboration, between strangers, responding to the prompt, love is…
The love is… Limited Edition book has been profiled in AnOther magazine, Magenta’s Imprint and Amelias Magazine, links below:
“Who, What, Why – Love Is… Last Tango in Paris”
Photographer and winner of Salon Photo Prize 2011 EJ Major’s latest work ‘love is…’.
www.anothermag.com
Q&A: EJ Major on Love is… | Imprint
In 2004, Salon Photo Award Winner and Flash Forward alum EJ Major began a large- scale mail art project that incorporated images from the 1972 film Last …
www.blog.flashforwardfestival.com
Amelia’s Magazine | An interview with artist EJ Major
Each of the 7000 postcards sent out by EJ Major carries an image from the film ‘ Last Tango In Paris’, possibly to act as inspiration to the recipients.
www.ameliasmagazine.com
from a distance
Hardcover, 10 x 8 inches, 116 pages, pricing information and book preview
‘from a distance’ uses William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying as a starting point. Major originally read and annotated this text at the age of 17 and 17 years later has revisited it. The edited text is interposed with images culled from Brownie annuals.
At 17 the artist often found herself unable to speak and returned repeatedly to Faulkner’s novel. The piece is an attempt both to equivocate this loss, the failure of language to adequately describe experience, and a celebration of the power of language to translate experience through narrative.
Catherine Somzé writes: “(…), in the series from a distance printed illustrations from a popular publication are put into poetical ‘play’ with words. Both manipulated and staged anew, from a distance is not only a demystifying reflection on the gender politics of youth movements and more generally of children’s education – a kind of ideology-critique – it is also a poetic comment on the tradition of book annotation, that is, an intervention whereby a text is both appropriated and provided with new personal meanings.”
From the Minigraph Essay “Everything Is…” which accompanied Major’s Solo Show at Streetlevel Gallery in Glasgow in 2008.