Exhibitions / Installation

Bad Cover Version, 2012

Canciones de amor y otras pasiones de origen romántico vol. III exhibition
Local Arte Contemporáneo
Santiago, Chile
2012

Romantic novels, acrylic box, photographies
Variable dimensions

I have always found myself attracted to the covers of romance novels. During the years I worked in a second-hand bookstore, these books became fetish objects for me. Around that time I began collecting them without fully knowing how I might use them, since I never read any of them.

Everything surrounding these objects appealed to me, from their utter strangeness and foreignness, to the people I observed interacting with them in the bookshop—primarily middle-aged and sometimes senior women who came to the store to exchange them once they had finished reading them.

Without any awareness of it, these compulsive readers form a community, united by the promise these covers hold, in which the same elements are repeated over and over again: a perfect combination of wavy typography and iconic imagery depicting, in most cases, a couple who is either passionately looking at, hugging, or kissing each other.

This work pays tribute to these covers and the clichés they represent, which are strikingly different from everyday, pedestrian love.