WEEK 3 Art Project: Playing Cards | Melanie Manuel, Diane Lee, Analí Cine

This piece came from the concept of the Ace in the game of War. In War, the Ace can be defined as a low-value card or a high-value card, depending on the players. This determination allowed us to reconsider how we might define a playing card, and so, we decided to create a card that encapsulates all four of the highest-ranking cards in a deck.

To accomplish the culmination of King, Queen, Jack, and Ace cards, we placed each one of the symbols on the corners of the card. Then, for the center image, we split four faces to make one whole face. The center image was done with photography, and afterwards, we took to Photoshop CC 2019 to put together the King, Queen, Jack, and Ace symbols along the corner of a playing card template and finally put our image.

The concept of this piece was also inspired by a discussion about the readings, where we drew the conclusion that Deenesh Sohoni’s “Unsuitable Suitors: Anti-Miscegenation Laws, Naturalization Laws, and the Construction of Asia” discusses that race purposefully creates categorization so that the state can maintain control over the individuals being racialized against, while Thomas Teo’s “The Historical Problematization of ‘Mixed Race’ in Psychological and Human-Scientific Discourses” explains that mixed race individuals go against the grain of categorization because they bleed into more than one which disallows the state to have full control over them.

Being an artist, for us, means that we get to convey our messages through art. It means that we can express how we feel or think in a way that is different than just using words. As artists, we are community advocates, we are courageous creators who want to promote awareness and equality. Our core belief in creating art is to start conversations about issues that multiracial folks experience as well as monoracial folks, because we believe it is important to understand where ideologies like race boundaries and other such topics we’ve discussed come from. And although we are educating, we also seek to learn as well.