Love Buttons Artist Gregory Sale April 6, 2008, 12pm - 4:30pm Sunday A'Fair Arts Festival Scottsdale Civic Center		Print This Page Email This Page

Love Buttons is a participatory event which employs poetic language and evocative text fragments to disperse a sea of poetry into the crowd of festival-goers. The participants connect through chance encounters and linguistic associations to spark a collective contemplation on love.

Sale initiates the process by going public with private text on the Love Buttons. A love button will be offered to you as you enter the festival. Yours might say You under-punctuate m.e., or beuti-fully, or RADIATE. You pin it on your pocket as you enter the festival. You might notice somebody else is wearing the same button or a mate to your button; or two people may decide to exchange different buttons with one another.

You may encounter one of the three Have More Love carts: exchange some love, buy more love or make more love. Upon approaching the carts, you may choose to exchange your button for one with a different message; buy longer poems comprised of several other button messages; or you might borrow a frisbee that says hover over me. If you play with the frisbee long enough, you get to keep it.

The patterns of connection inherent in the poetic language are reflected in a smattering of signs (large versions of the buttons themselves) mounted to lampposts across the festival grounds.

The Scottsdale Civic Center Mall is home to Robert Indianal's Love sculpture. In creating Love Buttons, Sale was inspired to engage in a conceptual conversation with Indiana's work. Sale developed the project while on artist residencies at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY, 2007 and at Ucross Foundation, Clearmont, WY, 2006. The project is multi-authored with assistance from a loose collective of poets and Spork Press in Tucson, AZ and the support of many brilliant minds.

Love Buttons was commisionedby Scottsdale Public Art. The Sunday A'Fair concert series is brought to by the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts and is free to the public.

Please join in and participate.

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