***Gene Schmidt would like to gratefully acknowledge the help of his team:

Alicia Hansen (photographer), Johnny Gerhart (cinematographer), Phillip Armand (editor)

PHILADELPHIA – Tiger Strikes Asteroid is pleased to announce the opening of its July exhibition, Lovetown, PA, a new project by New York artist Gene Schmidt.

Lovetown, PA is a multi-layered project towards making sense of a text, a city and a sentiment. It is part-journey; part sculpture; part social experiment and part installation. Not only has Schmidt walked across Philadelphia with his cobbled-together set of scrap-wood stencils spelling out St. Paul’s encomium of love (popularized by innumerable wedding ceremonies), but he has thoroughly documented it as well, creating another rich layer of record. The re-purposed, visual texture of the squares reflects the neighborhood’s own texture, at the same time the passage investigates the urban results of William Penn’s Holy Experiment. In this way it becomes a truly living text – literally walking the city’s span step by step, block by block; testing itself against a contemporary, exterior reality. It’s highly appropriate then, that the words are created with knocked-out letters: the city environment, captured as an ongoing, ad hoc positive element seen through the stencils, is continually allowed to speak anew through the text. Today’s city of Brotherly Love, including some normally-overlooked areas, finally gets a word in edge-wise, through some ancient words, as Lovetown, PA metes its way across the city.

Gene Schmidt is an artist based in New York. His most recent project, Manhattan Measure, was a street-based journeying project and installation. Since 2008, the video documentation of the project has been screened at numerous film festivals, including Nashville Film Festival; Los Angeles United Film Festival; Big Apple Film Festival and Staten Island Film Festival.