Here's three of several projects which look at playing cards' symbolic patterns and physical structures.
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.
Prototype is a self-portrait, which can be assembled into a precarious likeness of a man. Like people themselves, real stability is in the the deck's elaboration through multiple shuffles. Each 4x6" card is made of two photographs mounted back to back.
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.