JACKPOT (Art is a Numbers Game)  at Eyre/Moore Gallery 2001.

My Father won the Mexican National Bank Lottery in 1972. Or something. Maybe it was an insurance thing. He won a bunch of money and we moved as a family of 5 to Florida from Mexico City, where he bought into a custom carpet company. My father has never been drunk in his life, but he loves the competition in a little wager. He loves numbers, and used to total the bill at the grocery in his head, including tax, handing the checker exact change before they finished ringing things up.

Everyone wants to hit the jackpot, have a windfall that takes their anxiety away, be it for fame or fortune. Millionaire, successful artist, fill in the blank. Taking 21 sets of numbers given to me by my father from a "system" he used to pick them, I played these against a randomly generated string for each of the 7 drawings over the course of the exhibition. In addition, we passed the hat and bought over 800 tickets for the closing night. These were displayed as big symbols, and for the party, we watched the drawing streamed on video. I think we won about $50. John Paul William Calvin Ore recited Pi to the 1000th integer in a climactic moment. Magic suit of numbers fabricated by Alex Martin.