Only one late 15th-century Tuscan dish seems to illustrate a real event, the 1354 meeting between the poet Petrarch and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. James Mundy, the director of the museum at Vassar, traced the source of the emperor's odd pose to the representation of a well-known king on a Tarot card of the period.
Balancing Infinity features a series of sculptures and 78 collages functioning, effectively, as a tarot deck of their own all inspired by the Rider-Waite deck.
They are defined by labels that could be the major arcana in a tarot deck of awkwardness: the Band Geek, the New Girl, the Loner, the Gamer, the Nerd; the group also includes a popular girl and a young lesbian teacher, whose perspectives are an interesting addition, even if their inclusion feels somewhat maladroit.
If you have a Tarot deck of cards, place them on the altar you've created and do a sacred reading for each other.
To start, you'll need a few spare quiet hours, a tarot deck of your very own, and a notebook.
When you ask a question of a tarot reading, imagine some of the answers you might get and what cards would represent them--*before* you start to draw.
Then there are portents, enough of them to fill a tarot deck: a pack of stray dogs, an abandoned church, a fresco of saints with the faces rubbed off, a young married couple romping ostentatiously on a backlit balcony, a professional funeral weeper who treats the narrator to a private performance of exquisitely manufactured grief.
Caprison tells THUMP that the video is meant to echo a tarot deck's six of swords card, "an image of a woman and child being ferried to a new land, a new dawn".
Sylvia Mitchell's next available palm reading will apparently take place in a jail cell, as her own future involves a stack of police complaints that is approaching the size of a tarot deck.
The person sitting in front of me is crushing all the stereotypes I had of a tarot card reader.
There are numerous purveyors of the supernatural, offering investment advice with the flip of a Tarot card or using psychic energy to help a CEO make hiring decisions.
