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YOUR FATE
Allan McCollum and Matt Mullican
March 6 - April 24, 2004

The Christine Burgin Gallery is pleased to announce the premier exhibition of "Your Fate," a collaborative project by Allan McCollum and Matt Mullican.

"Your Fate" is a system for answering unanswerable questions, or perhaps divining your future. In the exhibition, a unique collection of symbols is presented in a number of different forms, including a set of twenty-five specially imprinted dice. The dice are accompanied by a manual, which aids in the interpretation of the symbols, and game tables that may be used on site for casting individual readings. Also included in the exhibition is a catalogue of framed drawings of the symbols and a large-scale model for a future die that would incorporate all the symbols into one object.

McCollum writes about this collaboration:

"Most of us have our interior pictures of the world mapped in a sketchy, slapdash way, and we allow the gaps in our understanding to be ignored, glossed over, or filled in by others whom we imagine to have greater expertise. As conditions can change, our worldviews can change, often from day to day: faith is broken, dreams are shattered, luck rewards, experience teaches. If this haphazard process could be made visible, what might it look like? One way to picture it would be to survey Matt's work from the last three decades.

"For Matt, the process itself of constantly reordering the sense of one's world is crucial -- even more important to him, I sometimes feel, than the production of art objects. When he suggested we collaborate on a project, it occurred to me that we might utilize my more materialist inclination to invent some sort of "finished product" that could help one repeatedly rework one's worldview as a matter of course: an oracle, or a divination tool. After all, isn't every good artwork an amalgamation of signs pointing to both the past and the future, and capable of reconfiguring it's meaning with each successive engagement?

"Matt has always depicted his cosmology in diagrammatic schemes and pictograms, so the vocabulary was already there for us; all we needed to do was create a system that worked. First, we pooled our resources and assembled a temporary pastiche of existing divination techniques: rune stones, tarot cards, the I Ching: we considered everything from using computers to using a rock in a tin can with yes on one side and no on the other. Matt then reworked these bits and pieces using the generic signs and logos we see everywhere in contemporary life, in the way he always does in his work, and expanded their meanings into universal categories."

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