A Fool!
Gianna B.
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I went on a roof. I climbed a tree. I stood in the shower in complete darkness and proceeded to blind myself with my camera's flash. The Fool’s Journey—the story told through the 22 Major Arcana cards of a 78-card tarot deck—follows the Fool as he meets a diverse cast of characters that guide him on his travels, a metaphor for the human life. Each of my cards—here displayed in a single sheet—corresponds in name and number to the Major Arcana, but each card’s original design has been reshaped into my own vision. I often diverge from the typically accepted “meaning” of the cards, superimposing onto this centuries-old tradition not only my personal artistic style but also my own metaphorical and symbolic truth. The Fool is an everyman: he represents all those who look to him in hopes of understanding our own existences. However, the same can be said of the rest of the Major Arcana’s personages, onto whom I have imposed anonymity. I ask now, If you are the Fool, am I your Magician? If I am the Fool, who are you to me? Out of this emptiness, we must define who is our Empress, our Hierophant, our Sun. Just as in our lives as a whole, in the blacked-out silhouettes of this series, it’s up to us to determine who we are, how we relate to the world around us, and where we’re going in our own Fool’s Journey. (I’m the Fool; I almost fell off the roof.)
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Creativity is an excuse to be as idiosyncratic, as esoteric, and perhaps as vaguely unnerving as I could ever hope to be. It's about starting off with an unfamiliar technique and only the loosest idea of what I want to create and transforming it into something representative of me.
