I discovered the divinatory art of Tarot when I was 16. I had grown up Christian, but hadn’t really felt a connection to it, so this discovery stuck with me deeply, and inspired my spiritual beliefs. As a result, it’s been a part of a lot of my art since, and I wanted to do a project surrounding it in “Upright and Reversed: Re-imagining the Arcana”.
Tarot has been around for centuries, but what is commonly called the ‘standard’ deck is the Rider Waite deck. It has become the base for most modern day tarot cards that you can find in any place that sells cards, and is the base for Upright and Reversed: Re-imagining the Arcana. A Tarot deck consists of 78 cards, 22 of which are the Major Arcana, and 46 that are the Minor Arcana cards. Major Arcana covers major events, and broad themes, while the Minor arcana is split into 4 suits that cover specific events. These suits are Wands, Pentacles, Swords, and Cups, but depending on the deck, they may be changed up. None of them were changed up for this, and are all present. The specific cards displayed in this are The Star, The Hermit, Strength, Temperance, the Ten of Wands, the Five of Cups, the Four of Pentacles, and finally the Nine of Swords.
There were two projects that inspired me. The first project was the Ghetto Tarot, a collaboration between Alice Smeets and Atiz Rezistans, and the second was Major Arcana by Giulia Pex. Both placed people into scenes of tarot cards, and as a I result, I did the same. I constructed this work using four models, photographs in the studio, and digital editing. They posed as if they were the figure in the card they pulled, and then I digitally edited them into the card. I illustrated the props, and then edited the figure out of the original Rider Waite card to not cover up the model. I designed a back of the card that both matched the border, would be the same upright and reversed, and mimicked a camera lens with the shape to harken back to the photography aspect.
Illustrated/Edited in Adobe Photoshop.
All ImagCopes ©