Pacific Northwest College of Art    Portland, OR

Alumni in Swiss Institute Exhibition

PNCA alumni Tabor Robak and Alex Mackin Dolan are both included The St. Petersburg Paradox, a group exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York. The exhibition, which also includes work by Jean Arp, Barbara Bloom, Marcel Duchamp, and others, is centered around a theory developed by 18th century Swiss mathematicians, brothers Nicolaus and Daniel Bernoulli, itself named after the St. Petersburg gamble:

In the St. Petersburg gamble, the house offers to flip a coin until it comes up heads. The payoff doubles each time tails appears, with this compounding stopping and payment being given at the first heads. By conventional definitions, the St. Petersburg gamble has an infinite expected value; nonetheless, most people share the intuition that they should not offer more than a few dollars to play. Explaining why people offer such small sums to play a gamble with infinite expected value remains a contentious question in economics and philosophy.

The St. Petersburg Paradox “invites artists to consider notions of risk aversion, expected value, and gaming.”

“Tabor Robak’s new [14-channel] video, A* (2014), which was commissioned for this exhibition, channels the intensity of the gamer’s ups and downs, ricocheting between the euphoria of an elusive win and resignation to inevitable loss.

“New works created by Alex Mackin Dolan… engage with the internet’s refraction of aspirational consumption. Elements of Dolan’s painting are culled from disparate images and memes born out of financial anxieties….”

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