At 60 years old, with no formal building experience or budget, Tressa “Grandma” Prisbrey began constructing her Bottle Village. What began as a sanctuary for her collection of 17,000 pencils evolved into an intricate assemblage of structures, built from glass bottles salvaged from the local dump and held together with homemade cement. Collecting, as some have observed, is often driven by a desire for closure, completion, and perfection—a way to manage the complex emotions of need and longing. Prisbrey’s life was not easy; she outlived six of her seven children, lost her home, and only six years after her passing, the Village was decimated by the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. To collect is to try to hold onto something, to salvage meaning from what would otherwise be lost. Those who gather, those who collect, can’t let go—or perhaps, they’ve let go completely.

The Museum of I Love You So Much is a conceptual container for that which exceeds containment but still longs to be preserved. First presented as an exhibition in 2023, this second iteration, The Museum of I Love You So Much (#2), which marks the final exhibition in Melrose Botanical Garden’s current space, continues to draw from the desire to collect and commemorate, treating objects as repositories of meaning that defy institutional containment. Playing with various forms of fragmentation and reconfiguration, the works presented here impose a whimsical order onto the intractable artifacts and sentiments accumulated through daily living, envisioning a spirited materiality in which familiar objects are not merely things to be categorized but elements with their own histories and potentialities. Through an evolving examination of material fragility and the persistence of experience, The Museum of I Love You So Much frames the museum not as a static institution but as a living, shifting space—one that privileges sensation and emotional resonance over rigid categorization.

Yet for all our attempts to hold, arrange, and reconfigure, collecting is never complete. The act itself acknowledges the inevitability of loss—things continue to slip from our grasp no matter how tightly we try to contain them. In Lee’s Marbles (Least to Most Favorite), Nico B. Young arranges the contents of a jar of marbles purchased from the world’s largest marble collection, which recently began selling off its collection following the passing of its founder. This act of ordering, of assigning preference and hierarchy to objects, mirrors the impulse at the heart of collecting: an attempt to tether the fleeting to the present. 

A constellation of friends, lovers, and strangers comprise this show. David Horvitz’s expansive collection of stolen spoons is strewn floor to ceiling, while Jackie Klein’s oil painting of a heartfelt note found cast aside gesture towards a kind of attachment theory. As human history trends toward increasing rationality, systemization, and control over nature, the museum stands as one of the most potent examples of this impulse to attach and protect. Within its walls, there is always a painful distance between an object and its origin. The Museum of I Love You So Much attempts, however delusionally, to collapse this distance. It suggests that we might act as stewards of our own passions and fantasies, ensuring they are carried safely forward. In doing so, we might also imagine the museum not as a site of detachment but as a vessel for preserving and producing our deepest attachments—a space that might, impossibly, hold and include everything and everyone we have ever loved.

In the aftermath of LA’s devastating wildfires, many have lost everything, and most have stood on the edge of that possibility. The question of what holds importance—physically, materially, and spiritually—echoes in our ears, eyes, noses, and throats. Amidst this wild and uncontrollable reality, we understand that significance is not fixed, and loss leaves no document, yet it takes shape through the shifting relationships between objects, images, and time 

In One Art, Elizabeth Bishop writes:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

“Lose something every day,” she says. Then, practice losing farther. The Museum of I Love You So Much insists on the endurance of feeling, on the survival of meaning in the smallest and most incoherent forms. To try to entomb our own lovestuffs in the museum is a gesture towards, and therefore against, death. You treat something like it is real, and then suddenly, it is. Some things persist—not because they are preserved, but because they have been loved into permanence.

It is true, paradoxically, that loss ultimately brings us closest to love. Listen to Leonard Cohen croon: True Love Leaves No Traces.

Happy Valentine's Day. I love you so much.