Lauren Was and her husband, Adam Eckstrom, below, both RISD grads and artists living in New York, stand beside their sculpture made out of discarded scratch-off lottery cards.

The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski

PROVIDENCE What’s the first thing people want to buy when they dream of winning the lottery?

Their dream car, of course!

That’s what inspired New York artists Adam Eckstrom and Lauren Was to create a life-size Hummer H3, complete with windshield wipers, mirrors and tires, out of thousands and thousands of discarded scratch-off lottery tickets. The wheel hubs are plastic casts of Hummer wheels covered in coins.“We started talking about what people dream about when they scratch the coin against the ticket,” said Was in a recent interview at the space at 70 Eddy St. in downtown Providence where their sculpture, Ghost of a Dream, is being displayed through Saturday.

“And almost always the first thing they dream about doing is buying a car,” she said. “This is a ghost of all those dreams.”

“And not even a job-quitting lottery win,” said Eckstrom. “They still buy a car.”

He said they first got the idea of working with lottery tickets when they found one on the sidewalk in the gallery area of Chelsea on Manhattan’s west side.

“We picked it up off the ground and figured we could do something with it,” he said. “Then we started noticing them everywhere. The tickets have so much color.”

The married couple, who are both graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design, said they found many more discarded tickets while walking their half husky/half pit bull named Banana through their Green Point neighborhood in Brooklyn. They said they found plenty on the ground or in the trash around bodegas, the Hispanic convenience stores that are plentiful in “the depressed neighborhood where we live.”

“Predominantly, people who buy (lottery tickets) don’t have a lot of money,” said Eckstrom, while admitting, “We buy scratch tickets occasionally.”

He said he worked on one project — a rainbow — but it did not work out. He said part of the reason was that he applied the tickets full and flat. By comparison, most of the tickets on Ghost of a Dream are overlapped, with only a hard edge and about a centimeter of color showing.

He said he developed the technique of overlapping the tickets from the work of 15th-century Italian paintings, which he came to appreciate while teaching at a RISD program in Rome. He said he particularly admired the work of Florentine friar and painter Fra Angelico and his treatment of the wings of angels and cherubs in which a hard edge was supplemented by a soft blurring to replicate the texture of feather.

Ghost of a Dream ripples with color, its red hood and front fenders blending back through orange, yellow and green side panels to darkish green at the rear. Its wheel wells are blue, the tires purple and chrome grille and mirrors shiny. But no one color is pure. The overlapping lottery tickets, which are blazes of garish color, create a dizzying display of brightly colored shards, clashing and meshing.

At the same time, it is easy to look through the grille or windows and see the frame. But Eckstrom and Was said that was part of the design.

“See, it’s just a shell,” said Was. “It’s just a dream.”

In addition to collecting tickets in Brooklyn, they also picked them up on visits to Miami and Minneapolis and had friends send tickets from as far away as Seattle and Los Angeles.

Once they had settled on creating the sculpture of a car, the question was: What car?

“We figured on the Hummer,” Was said. “Big car, big money, big dreams.”

They subsequently spent time in Hummer dealerships, including the one at the Hurd Auto Mall in Johnston, measuring and taking photographs.

“We taped the photographs to the frame while we were a applying the tickets,” Was said.

The creation of Ghost of a Dream was sponsored through a sculpture class called Artist Projects at the Rhode Island School of Design where Was is an instructor. Each year an artist is awarded the opportunity to create a large scale project during a six-week class. He or she is provided with a stipend and a team of student assistants.

Eckstrom was signed on as Was’ partner and they created the piece in about six weeks with the assistance of 10 student assistants.

“Six weeks from conception to completion,” said Was. “We started the project on Jan. 4 and it was completed on Feb. 28.”

Eckstrom said he reckoned it contains about 2,400 combined work hours, noting that at times he and Was worked 20 hours straight.

“This would take about an hour,” he said, demonstrating a small section of fender. And that was just applying the lottery tickets.

Eckstrom said the frame of the vehicle is built of plywood on a metal frame and can be disassembled into pieces, with the hood being one piece, front fenders two more, the grille another and so on.

“It comes apart just like a car,” he said.

Eckstrom, 33, a native of Minneapolis, graduated from RISD in 2005 with an MFA in painting. Was, 31, from Boston, graduated in 2004 with an MFA in sculpture. They were married last year and live in Green Point with a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Was commutes up to Providence two days a week, staying with friends, although during the making of Ghost of a Dream, they both spent five days a week up here.

While Was teaches at RISD, Eckstrom, who used to work at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea, said he has sold enough paintings to allow him to focus on creating art at their studio. He said he has always loved cars, noting a 1966 Volvo that he used to own and a 1973 Honda CB 750 modified by British motorcycle ace Paul Dunstall.

Eckstrom and Was said this was the first showing of the piece, which is for sale for $35,000, which is the value of the lottery tickets that have been used. Eckstrom said he wanted to use about $35,000 worth of tickets because that is the mid-price of a Hummer H3.

“Hummers range from about $30,900 to $39,000, so $35,000 is in the middle,” he said, adding that he kept count of the value of the tickets rather than their actual number.

“We wanted the piece to contain the value of a Hummer,” he said. “And $35,000 is also the price of the piece.”

“Neither of us has spent this much time on one piece,” he said, adding that the sculpture had come out better than he thought it would.”

“It’s the most successful thing we’ve made,” he said.

“It’s been very well received,” added Was. She said people passing by the shop while they were setting it up were excited by the piece.

“We were looking for accessibility for everyone,” she said. “We want to create wonder and excitement for everyone.” She said their next project with lottery tickets involves another American dream — a tropical paradise.

And while the Hummer in Ghost of a Dream is accurate in all the main details, it has no gas cap and no exhaust pipe and that is no oversight.

“It’s the dream car,” said Was, noting that such details would be too close to reality. “They would ruin the dream.”

Ghost of a Dream can be seen at 70 Eddy St., one block north of Westminster Street in downtown Providence tomorrow from 12 to 8:30 p.m., including the closing reception which runs from 5 p.m. until closing.

The show will be open Friday 12 to 6 p.m. and Saturday 12 to 5 p.m. The show, which opened Feb. 29, closes on Saturday.

The show is sponsored by the Arts & Business Council of Rhode Island and Cornish Associates. The council supports exhibitions in various sites in downtown Providence.

For more information, check out:

http://www.artsandbusinessri.org/

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pelsworth@projo.com