"Monday Night Football Disaster"
March 31, 2002, acrylic on canvas board
There was a period when I gambled on sports, namely football, alot, and while I was doing this I painted alot of "Sports Voodoo" boards, paintings I made using sports figures and other iconography in order to either document events after the fact or actually cause certain events to happen, or a collage of both. It was interesting how a mundane interest in predicting sporting events actually led me to a bigger picture fascination with the idea of using art and symbols as a way of facillitating prophecy, relating it to events of greater magnitude. This particular voodoo board was made during and after the 2001 season NFL playoffs. It's the year the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl for the first time. I actually predicted that they would long before the season started, which was amazing considering they weren't even on anybody's radar and caused a HUGE upset in their defeat of the Rams in the Super Bowl. The main inspiration of this painting, though, was to document a huge gambling loss I suffered on the final night of Monday Night Football with the Vikings playing the Ravens. I was so devastated by it that I wanted to make it a personal mythological event by making a painting dedicated to it. The surrounding symbology was to give me greater luck betting in the playoffs, which I did have.
|
