PROGNOSTICATORS
This book was made to document my installation at the Sofia Paper Biennale 2011, and also includes images from my stay in Bulgaria. It was funded by an Individual Projects Grant from 4Culture, King County Arts Commission, Washington State, and a travel grant from Foundation for Contemporary Art, NYC.
Edition of three copies, 12" x 9", red spiral bound, archival inkjet printed, tarpaper cover with metallic ink, rubber stamp title.
This work is called Prognosticators, for the universal child’s game of predicting the future, called “fortune teller” or “cootie catcher” in the U.S. and “solnitza” in Bulgaria.
PROJECT STATEMENT:
Prognosticators, folded tar paper, each 18”x 18” x 12”
Installation 12 feet x 24 feet
This large installation of folded tarpaper addresses issues of fossil fuels – referencing the 113 states, provinces and countries that produce oil. Each “prognosticator” is numbered for one of the countries. The installation’s presence on the gallery’s white marble floor is silent and dark testament to our universal reliance on fossil fuels, as well as the question of our future – the recent oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico and the ongoing ones in the Niger Delta offer rich subject matter.
The material – ordinary roofing paper – is evocative in its smelly blackness of many psychic states. I grew up making frequent visits to the ooze of the La Brea Tar Pits in my native Los Angeles, California, where artifacts are still excavated from this geologic formation. For me, this underground source of fossils, bones, fuel and prehistory is analogous to the upwelling of images from a mysterious source.