The “Divination of 2012,” the fifth installment of artist-augur Lynn Nesseth’s ‘Divination Series,’ is a conceptual artwork collaborating the psychic and photographic craft of thirteen artists. Nesseth and twelve appointed artists are using consecrated single-shot disposable “Fortune Cameras” as mediums for evidencing prophetic images of their lives. The pictures taken will be laid into spreads; each individual photograph acting as a card with its own fortune. Twelve pairs of two compose each roll of 24 exposures, signifying binary aspects of the twelve Astrological Signs. Each photograph is contextualized into a realm of the artist’s life by its placement into its corresponding Astrological House, or life field, based on the artist’s time of birth. Adherent to American “pop-ritual”, each fortune will be tagged with phrases relative to aspects of each House via “in bed” or “in my unions.”
In essence, the spread provides a reading of each individual artist’s Natal Birth Chart; the first pair of photographs corresponding with the artist’s Ascendant or Rising Sign. The spread was divined by Nesseth while walking in the forest carrying a single-shot disposable camera under a sun in Scorpio, a moon transitioning from Pisces into Aries at 2:02pm conjunct Uranus and the influence of divinatory psychotropics. In this divined system, the unknown is harnessed through the artists’ intuitive choices for content and composition within their imagery. The most revealing indication of meaning will be foremost the artists’ feelings and intuitive impressions when regarding a given subject within the spread. Adjunct to the installation, archetypal portraits are being taken of the inspired twelve. Each artist will be gifted an album containing and documenting their personal divinatory reading.
