In Try Your Luck, I wanted the viewer to feel the weight of the beer bottle against the support of the books (the bottle is suspended). You know, there are a lot of books about Indian people and Indian culture, but most seem preoccupied with the past and ignore the present. The beer bottle is symbolic of the "other reality" that tends to be ignored by the writer's of these books.

 

I use shovels in some of my sculptures as symbols of ordinary working class people, but also as a symbol of "digging up the past". In this work, the three shovels have stories written on the handles. These stories are written by native people and are concerned with "drinking".

 

The target at the bottom adds a deceptively "fun" aspect to the work and contradicts the serious nature of what I am trying to say. I've always felt that the life of a native person in the 21st century is full of contradiction.