First thing you should know: Everything you see here is made from just lottery tickets.
Second thing you should know: Artist Alex Lockwood does not play the lottery.
Alex recently moved to Nashville, Tennessee. Before that, he lived here in Brooklyn where he started to collect things he found on the street and make art from it. I love New York, but it is fucking trashy. When I was in college, in rural Virginia, I used to always pick up trash I found and throw it away, telling my oh-so-long-haired self that, if everyone else in the world did the same, the world would be a clean, beautiful place.
Again, I’m no mathematician, but I think trash might outnumber us here—it’s a losing battle, man. Plus New York is no Harrisonburg, Virginia. I might get gonorrhea if I pick up the wrong thing.
Luckily, Alex Lockwood has no such reservations. Or at least he didn’t when he moved from Williamsburg to Clinton Hill way back when and noticed the prodigious amount of discarded scratch-off lottery tickets that covered the sidewalks in front of the neighborhood bodegas. Inspired by tramp art and art made in prison, where creators have a severely limited palette of materials from which to work but, often, a great amount of time to focus in on detail, Alex started creating intricate sculptures from the tickets.
You can see more of Alex’s work, both lottery-ticket-based and not, on his site.
Now, if we could just convince him to come back to Brooklyn and train, say, 1,000 artists in this method we’d have a spotless city. And some pretty impressive artwork.
