CROSSED DESTINIES
A Tarot of the Artists

The tarots are a tapestry of theater. These ancient cards of chance, replete with artistic excellence, first became popular as narrative vehicles in the courts of Renaissance Italy. By 18th century France their use in cartomancy was widespread. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tarots were given to that plethora of theosophical and parapsychological uses to which the esoteric arts are susceptible. Read through visions, symbols, and allegories, the tarot arcana became gateways into inner consciousness, and pathways through metaphysical understandings of the collective unconscious. Within this framework of experiential and intuitive method is there an equivalent in the current visual vocabulary of the creative process... is there a Major Arcana for the 21st century as interpreted by its contemporary artists...

"CROSSED DESTINIES" provides an opportunity for artists in painting, mixed media, book art, sculpture, and installation to participate in experience of esoteric art, using the keys of the creative process to unlock the enigmas of the mysterious face cards of the ageless and recondite tarot.

The portraitures of the Major Arcana reveal a ruptured reality profuse with the wondrous imagery of fabled characters and arcane forces at play beneath the surface of civility and chivalrous display. These painterly surfaces are meant to beguile the viewer, initiating a quest through the compelling dreamscapes of the psyche. Elegant, luminous, ambiguous, and serenely surrealistic, these menus of fortunes and virtues, poignant and phantasmagorical, are a feast of creative satisfaction for the unfettered imagination.

"CROSSED DESTINIES" has been assigned to artists whose work is richly immersed in the language of allegory and the nuance of magical realism. In this "Tarot of the Artists" they hope to bring their personal voices to a crossroads of creative destiny, validating the myths, histories, and legends of these archaic imageries, not through traditional replication, but by new interpretations of old forms.

James Pinney, Curator
(718) 628-5544