Ben Guttin ::: Hideous Beast ::: Chris Hudson ::: Lynn Marie Kirby ::: Robin Lambert 07/08 ::: Amber Landgraff ::: Jessica James Lansdon ::: Wednesday Lupypciw 07/08 ::: Travis Meinolf ::: Barbara Meneley 07/08 ::: Ashley Neese 08::: Ashley Neese and Gary Wiseman ::: Berit Nørgaard ::: Paul Notzold ::: Susanne Cockrell and Ted Purves ::: Sal Randolph ::: Kerri-Lynn Reeves ::: Brion Nuda Rosch ::: Heath Schultz ::: James Servin ::: Amy Steel and Eric Nordstrom ::: Sara Thacher 07/08 ::: Turner Prize ::: Karen Wardle

Sara Thacher makes work dealing with the concept of exchange. Lately she has focused on creating projects for a small, specific audience, even an audience of one. Sara earned her BFA in glass from the Rhode Island School of Design and a MFA in Social Practice from the California College of the Arts. She has enacted projects at home and abroad in various art contexts and other less expected places, recently initiating and producing The Distributed Exhibition, a large exhibition of site-specific
work, under the auspices of the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art.

Wager: play 'rock, paper, scissors' with me
As part of the Infinite Exchange Gallery’s presence at the Zero One Festival, I will gamble with visitors on the outcome of rounds of the game, Rock, Paper, Scissors (also known as Rochambeau). I will bring an assortment of rocks, scissors and paper embossed with a diagram of the game (see attached image) as my initial stake. All of my winnings will also be added to this pool as the night progresses,
providing a constantly shifting portrait of my luck.

Participants may choose any item on display to constitute my wager as long as they put up something of their own that they consider to be of equal value. They can then challenge me to a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors— winner takes all. Win or lose, I will record the history of the bet on the object itself (if possible) or on a tag attached to the object. Therefore, items that have been used as my stake
previously may have records of multiple bets recorded on them. Through this process, visitors must confront value in terms of what they might risk giving up for a chance at what I accumulate. The objects that I use as my beginning stake possess different perceived values; the rocks occupy one end of the scale and the hand embossed paper inhabits the other (almost approaching traditional conceptions of an art object). When I previously enacted a version of this proposal at Ego Park, an alternative exhibition space in Oakland, it was interesting to track the change in an object’s value, the more times I had wagered with it and won. Thus, the papers with more writing at the bottom were felt by participants to be worth more than the papers without any history. Participants also took great care to ensure that their stake was indeed of equal value, and many remarkable discussions
ensued, with the bystanders often acting as referees.

I think that the presence of a project at IEG in which you either get nothing for something or something for nothing, throws into question all of the other exchanges in which one thing is traded for another. I am excited to present this project in the context of a street fair, instead of the context of an art gallery. To me, games of chance seem at home in street fairs and carnivals, and I look forward to using this opportunity to address notions of value, risk, and negotiation.