Sam Finch

Gambling and the symbols that follow it take up the walls of my mind, and the minds of millions of people daily in search of wealth and pleasure. These wonderfully gilded objects of chance which represent money and masculinity mean to me a fascinating and beautifully false god. In ways, aching to be understood as something other than what has been made of them.

Symbols garner the world in ways we recognize and not, but are always important exchanges of information. Histories of gambling lead from certain derelictions of the divine. The symbols and objects present have had their holiness forced out of them by institution and capital, as almost every human has today. We can look into their emptiness and see ourselves desperately peering back out of the hole. Holding the ancient and living the modernity at once is what I aim for through art.

The planes of mind and ‘reality’ concur with my use of these symbols in pictorial and 3D space respectively. In these alternate worlds that exist within my illustrative work, symbols and objects function more in the ethereal as corresponds to the nature of 2D. Layers of color and shape weave over and under each other nonsensically, while the representational aspect holds the dream together. When entering the 3D as this project delves, prudence is essential as I must not treat these items in the realm they are so often put into, while still holding these qualities dear.

The questioning and exploration of the nature of gambling and the likes is made through assembling object empathies. This holds within me and the collective unconscious the godliness of man which will forever be lost, and the hope to return to it. Just as a down-on-their-luck gambler holds deeply to the hope for fortune.