5:30-7:00 PM– Opening Reception
Exhibit Title: Two Tarot Visions: Art of Garin Horner & Christine Reising
An exhibition of two Tarot card collections, created in two different processes, photography and printmaking.
About The Wonder Workers: A Major Arcana Tarot Series
Wonder workers are people who perform miracles or astonishing acts. The Wonder Worker major arcana Tarot cards contain portraits of people who fall into these categories. The cards started as monotype prints that were created on a soft plate with acrylic paints. Each print started with an inkjet transfer using imagery related to the person and concept of the Tarot card. Conceptually, this series was initiated by the discovery of the French mystic and healer Nizier Anthelme Philippe. I found him, or perhaps he found me, while researching a trip to Provence. I discovered that his grave was located in the Loyasse Cemetery in Lyon, first on my itinerary. Cemeteries are a vital part of travel for me as they are the repositories of the history and culture of a location. After arriving at a series focusing on mystics, I was then inspired to seek out others from France and eventually broadened my search to include additional countries and periods.
Of course, Maitre Philippe became my Magician.
About the Crowley & Waite Victorian Tarot Deck
In many ways The Crowley-Waite Victorian Tarot deck is unique among the vast assortment of tarot card decks. Though the deck’s imagery is modeled after the enduring Rider-Waite-Colman-Smith deck, the pictures on the cards are photorealistic. Some of the photos, like the Hanged Man, have also been reimagined to expand their metaphorical and symbolic meanings. The design concept for the card’s imagery is based on vintage cabinet cards, Victorian era photographs widely produced across the U.S. and Europe.
The pictures are a fusion of real vintage cabinet card portraits, late 19th-century landscape photos, and the photographic art and design of Garin Horner. Generative AI and Photoshop were used to stitch the composites together. Note: all sourced photographs are in the public domain and copyright-free.
In addition, the deck features historical figures, including the namesakes of this deck: the famed occultist Aleister Crowley and the scholarly mystic Arthur Edward Waite. Among the portraits in the major and minor arcana, Horner highlighted many mystics and occultists, both real and fabled. Doing so, he fabricated remarkable photo-realistic imagery that stirs the imagination and awakens a reader’s intuition.
7:00-8:00 PM – Gallery Talk: The Art of Making Tarot Cards
The Art of Making Tarot Cards brings together two distinct artistic voices. Join photographer Garin Horner and printmaker Chris Reising for a rare, behind-the-scenes look at how tarot decks are conceived, built, and brought to life. Come and learn how the artists reimagined tarot traditions through a contemporary lens. From the initial concept to the finished cards, they’ll unpack the visual decisions, symbolic frameworks, and creative risks that shape a working deck.
Garin Horner
Garin Horner is an artist, author, and full professor of Art at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan. He has been an award-winning photographer for over 30 years. Horner’s work has been exhibited worldwide and is included in the collections of several art museums across the United States. Horner is an authority on pedagogy in photography higher education and has authored three influential books on teaching and learning photography. He is a long-standing member of the Royal Photographic Society in England and the Society for Photographic Education in the U.S.
Christine Reising
Christine Reising is a multi-disciplinary artist who has been exhibiting for more than forty years throughout the Midwest and Canada. Her varied art practice includes printmaking, collage and book arts. She has constructed and designed over 30 of her own books and has collaborated with other artists and writers on theirs. In addition, for many years Christine created costumes and sets for Ann Arbor theater companies that transitioned into her installation artworks often incorporating books and viewer participation. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree in Printmaking from the University of Windsor in
1980. Professor Emerita Reising taught at Siena Heights University from 1984 until her retirement in 2014. Additional positions that she held during her tenure included Department Chair, Gallery Director, and European Study Program Director.