Gamble
Several projects look at games as symbolic patterns embedded in physical structures: a museum and self-portrait of cards, altered dice, and tiny paper sculptures merging pattern and chance.
Card Sculptures - Beneath the 'pass-time' and casino glitz of gaming runs a current which addresses the inscrutable. Destiny, fate, privledge and coincidence, emotion and individuality all come into play in the structure of cards and dice. These projects explore the qualities of gaming instruments as very potent symbols of a volitile, but somehow also a constant world.
Prototype is a self-portrait, which can be assembled into a precarious likeness of a man. Like people themselves, real stability is in the deck's elaboration through multiple shuffles. Each 4x6" card is made of two photographs mounted back to back.
The Delaware Art Museum commissioned Model Building for a regional biennial exhibition in 1996. The project is a model of the museum, but fluid and vulnerable rather than static and predictable, built as deck of 340 cards. Actual playing cards are laminated on the face side with photographs of the museum's surfaces - facades, galleries, ceilings and floors, storage, bathrooms, offices, etc., creating a system of building "suits" that can be reorganized at will - or by chance.
When using dice, it is only the top-facing number that is counted, yet that result requires the constant presence of all the other possibilities. Regulation casino dice were altered to reflect this more inclusive view of luck.
Shuffle was done while in residence at the Pouch Cove Studios on the Atlantic Coast of Newfoundland, an altered deck of fifty-two cards thrown into and shuffled by the surf until they disapeared below. I was fascinated by the debris of human origin that peppered this rugged and austere place. It was as if such fragments, like Jonah lodged in a whale, might somehow validate humanity, even while destinies are decided by much grander forces.
