A Chance of Weather

2015

recycled lottery tickets, acrylic paint, paper

42" x 11" x 11"

commissioned by the City Pages newspaper

Weather is a hallmark of life in Minnesota. I see an intersection between our weather and the lottery -- each is a game of chance. I took inspiration from the colorful, but often indecipherable, nature of color weather radar; this complements the detailed rules and instructions on the back of the tickets.

This piece is constructed of approximately 1,500 lottery tickets, each individually cut and placed. There are as many as 18 layers of lottery tickets in the most dense section. While the lottery ticket is actually played on the front, I found the detailed rules and instructions on the back of the tickets so visually compelling that I couldn't resist using them.

My desire was to transform the material, but still retain its essential nature and make certain that it was recognizable as a fragment of a lottery ticket. Since this is not a traditional art material, I performed several dozen experiments on the tickets before discovering a mechanism for attaching them into a durable cyclonic form.