THE LOWBROW TAROT PROJECT
16: The Tower
JESSICA JOSLIN
The Tower (2010)
Antique jewelry and findings, brass, bone, glove leather, chains, glass eyes.
8" x 8" x 4"
$3,500.00
click image for close-up
The Tower card is an omen that falsely held beliefs are about to come crashing down. In this interpretation, I looked to imagery that haunted me as a child: A Night on Bald Mountain, from Walt Disney's Fantasia. In it, a bucolic mountainside transforms, with the setting of the sun, into a bat-like demon. I imagined the Tower itself unfurling and turning into a bat creature. As its wings open, the chains attached to the wings and to the tower begin to tear the fortress apart. The bat is representative of the hubris inherent in false belief, that which eventually necessitates it's destruction.
Born in 1971 in Boston, MA, Jessica Joslin grew up collecting flies off the windowsill to look at under her microscope. Ever since, she has been enchanted with collecting a magpie’s array of remnants from the natural world. The collection gradually grew to include obsolete bits of antique mechanical mechanisms, hardware and other oddball artifacts. In 1992, she began building the first beasts of this menagerie, using objects sent in a care package from her father, the same pieces that she’d collected as a child.