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"The memory that you once sat at my feet will begin to haunt you, and in bitterness and shame you will want to degrade me. I do not want your admiration now, because I do not want your insults in the future. I bear with my loneliness now in order to avoid greater loneliness in the years ahead. You see, loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egotistical selves."

「かつてはその人の膝の前に跪いたという記憶が、今度はその人の頭の上に足を載せさせようとするのです。私は未来の侮辱を受けないために、今の尊敬を斥けたいと思うのです。私は今より一層淋しい未来の私を我慢する代りに、淋しい今の私を我慢したいのです。自由と独立と己れとに充ちた現代に生れた我々は、その犠牲としてみんなこの淋しみを味わわなくてはならないでしょう」

"What do I want from you? — ... Sometimes I feel I'm going stark mad — That I ought to say — Dearest — You are so much to me that you must not come near me — Coming may bring you darkness instead of light — And it's in Everlasting light that you should live."

"All I want is to preserve that wonderful something which so purely exists between us."

  - Excerpt of a letter from Alfred Stieglitz to Georgia O'Keeffe on May 26, 1918.

Conceptual neon artist, Olivia Steele (*1985) uses neon lighting to charge spaces with ironic and spiritual meaning. A native of Nashville, Tennessee and resident of London and Berlin, Steele's work ranges from small to large installations that employ the traditional commercial medium of neon glass to make intimate statements and to question modern culture. She relishes the idea of contrast and contradiction, and toys with out innate perceptions. The juxtaposition of the neon statement and the environment it is placed in, challenges conventional semiotics and evokes a wide range of interpretation.

Her work has always been deeply personal - a frank exploration of her sexuality, her relationships, her life. She has made an extraordinary journey from wild youth to pillar of the cultural establishment - just how blurred is the line between her art and her life?

Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective artist, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a "readymade artist" and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people's work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box - as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes - there is always the possibility of what she calls the "human strike." Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. She grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements, and the production of various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property.

So inspirational & fascinating!