Penelope Umbrico is an artist and photographer best known for appropriating images found using search engines and picture sharing websites. she then manipulates them to construct large-scale images or installations per a minimalist aesthetic.
My favourite work she has produced is the series of broken TV screens and sunsets. I like how she manages to gather together images so simple and turns them into something new and interesting.
I had the idea to use some of my own items that I have collected throughout the years and show them as a series of things in an order like Penelope Umbrico uses. Some of the things I could use are Birthday or Christmas cards and use the imagery or just the written message inside, I could also further select one word in the text such as happy birthday as the handwriting on each card is always different. I also have a series of wine bottle lids, playing cards, and my personal favourite collection that is ever increasing which is my collection of joker playing cards. I love how they are always so different in every stack of cards.
The Joker is a genuine one of a kind card, only to be accompanied by one similar to him in all of a deck. For every 52 cards, there are two that are often removed from play and either set aside, or thrown away. If we are to look at a deck of playing cards as a population, we can see that there are many suits and numbers that find a way to balance each other through out play. However, the Jokers do not fit into this category because they are not assigned a value. They have no designated suit and there is only ever two. Why is it then that there can be 4 Aces and 4 Kings with matching Queens, with 4 Jacks and only 2 Jokers? Perhaps because the role of the joker is to express the deck. To show what the other cards cannot. It’s perhaps not because of being unvalued, or unwanted, but because that is simply not how you play the game. Jokers have a role in playing cards most definitely. Yet, there role is to express the deck, not play the game. So if I were to take a collection of jokers from multiple decks, I am collecting expression and uniqueness and without a joker…the deck now looks like every other.
I have also scanned in some pictures of cards to try and think of an order in which I could show them, either as a jumbled mess or as a series in rows and columns.
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