Clothespin

Catya Plate's Clothespin Tarot arrives as sculpture: a slipcase of three compartments holding book, card tray, and an original Clothespin Freak, a seated figure with movable parts assembled from clear plastic clothespins and doll fragments. The cards photograph her assemblage world, mixed-media beings built from the domestic hardware of holding-things-together, which is, once you notice it, an entirely serious tarot premise: figures made of fasteners, bodies improvised from parts, the arcana as things provisionally pinned into shape. Plate is a working artist and the deck belongs to art-multiple culture as much as to divination, the included figure making each set partly an original. Surreal assemblage reads the way collage does, by juxtaposition, but with a physical uncanniness photographs of objects carry and drawings do not. It suits art collectors first, surrealists, readers who like their decks to unsettle slightly, and anyone building the catalog's shelf of tarot-as-art-object. Readers wanting warmth should know the Freaks are watching them back.