The Today Your Love project explores the myriad ways that artists approach practice. West Space is interested in a more dynamic and responsive model for engaging with artists’ practices, which acknowledges the development phase as well as final presentation. Today Your Love is conceived as an incubator or laboratory that gives a space for artists to test and explore different ideas. West Space’s relocation to a new site, one almost double the size of our old one, has enabled us to excitingly expand our program. We have designated a series of spaces – the back space, the forum space and the library space – to be areas that we program in a more flexible, open-ended manner. We want to encourage onsite activity and hope that the new West Space will be a space for making and thinking as well as a place to view artwork. Today Your Love will launch these spaces as well as a model of more responsive artistic programming at West Space.

Over 2009 and 2010 West Space explored ways to enable artists’ practices that are process- based, collaborative, and of different durations and diverse forms. This resulted in a series of projects including Tomorrow the World, a festival of experimental audiovisual, performance and sound art that ran for three weeks in 2009, and The West Wing, a project space that operated out of Melbourne Central shopping complex across 2010–11. These projects enabled us to pres- ent different types of artistic activity – on-site studio activity, discursive programs, events and performances – alongside the highly resolved exhibitions of ‘finished’ work, which have com- prised West Space’s core artistic program. Today Your Love is the next iteration in this series (and one which also borrows its title from a song by the Ramones).

The Today Your Love project comprises fourteen discrete projects created by a group of imaginative and talented artists. When we invited them to be involved, we encouraged them to develop ‘in proposition’ style projects where final outcomes may be unknown. We encouraged risk-taking and experimentation, and stressed that we did not expect them to exhibit a fully resolved and highly finished suite of works. We suggested that potential outcomes could take any form and they could go for any duration – from a few hours up to a number of weeks.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Australia Council for the Today Your Love project.

Download the Today Your Love program here.