Take Care,

What does it mean to “take care,” especially on the page, as a send off? When someone says “take care,” it can be received as a poignant expression, something sincere. Yet it can also signify something cold and unfeeling—a colloquial conclusion to end a conversation with closure. 

From love letters and text messages to postcards and DMs, Take Care, explores the intimacy and distance created through correspondence in the likeness of the phrase’s multifaceted meanings on the page. 

This collection of writings, poems, and visual works thus seeks to question how we navigate maintaining relationships through correspondence in its many forms. As technology makes it easier for us to maintain relationships and instantaneously communicate across great physical distances, our friendships, romances, and familial relationships too, are likely to shift. Is it possible to sustain authentic connections through the veil of a screen or handwritten parchment? And does the vulnerability and closeness that physicality permits translate through text and across distance? 

Through multidisciplinary practices, the featured artists and writers in Take Care, consider these questions. Together, they examine what happens between the written word, the medium, the composer, the language, the recipient, and the both distant and intimate act of crafting such messages. We, the editors, hope that as you venture through these pages, you’ll consider your own personal exchanges and how these forms of communication act as a vehicle for affection as much as a mechanism for remoteness.   

Sophie Amado & Luna Goldberg

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This limited edition artist book was published in conjunction with an exhibition by the same name at Ground Level Platform (Chicago, IL) in May 2019.