Y Gallery
Augusto Yayico
For further information, please contact Y Gallery at 718.565.6285
www.ygallerynewyork.com | info@ygallerynewyork.com
32-70 85th Street, Jackson Heights, Queens, NY 11370
Making Good Luck
Essay by Eleanor Heartney
Making Good Luck focuses on the inescapable role played by luck in any artist’s career.
Talent is vital, of course, but so are intangible things like timing, friends, and just blind chance. Is
there any way for artists to influence the apparently arbitrary workings of fate?
This exhibition of work by fifteen artists, curated by Larry Litt and Cecilia Jurado, presents
some of the ways that they try to load the dice. Having immigrated to The City from all over the
world, they invoke both personal talismans, cultural symbols and rituals in their quest to ‘make it’
in New York.
For instance, Ikjoong Kang draws on good luck symbols from around the world with
Buddha with Lucky Objects, a curved field of Buddha images topped with various emblems of
luck, including a laughing Buddha, a model car, a small statue of a college graduate and a replica
of the sacred heart of Jesus.
Ian Laughlin’s Tiki – Fortune Favors the Bold playfully blends good luck symbols from
indigenous Maori culture with western references and objects to transform a automobile tire into
an emblem of fortune. That this is a Good Year tire and that its Fortera label can easily be
transformed into the word Fortune, only adds to the mix.
Mario Silva’s Totem, a large scale image of a ghostly figure in a skull mask, invokes
Mexican celebrations of Day of the Dead, and reminds us that in that culture, skeletons are
positive emblems of the continuity of life and contact with the after world.
Luck takes many forms. Orit Ben-Shitrit presents Mazal, an intertwining of the Hebrew
letters for luck. She also acknowledges the role played by generosity in any striving for success,
offering copies of her talisman for visitors to take with them.
Dirk Vandenberk suggests t