Artist's Psychobabble - take with a grain of salt. Form your own impressions.

(Cosmic Checkers) is an assemblage made from a checkers board, and can actually be played. The squares on the board contrast the starry reaches of outer space with a topographic map of our explored and mapped earth. The checkers pieces have positive and negative prints of eyes on each side. One side is open, the other is closed, and if you look carefully you will notice the positive and negative eyes are switched across the board, to show the unity in what at first looks to be duality. Are we actually opposed as it seems on the surface, or can we realize our ultimate unity and work together?

[In answer to a recent question]
My goals with Cosmic Checkers.. I'm trying to remember my original goals as it was almost 20 years ago! At that time I was taking an upper-level art photography class with Jerry McMillan at CSUN. He didn't have the traditional limited view of photography as a flat 2-D picture in a frame, and encouraged/inspired us to push our limits. Many of us took that class several times, coming up with increasingly creative works and discussing them in front of class, inspiring and challenging each other. Cosmic Checkers was created for one of those class sessions.
I do not consciously "think out" much of my art work; it flows as I create it. I come to it with a few pre-conceived notions, an idea of what imagery I want to use or what materials.. then I look at it and more inspiration wells out from somewhere inside me. It often isn't until later that I can step back and try to figure out why I made what I did.. I then notice the images I used (often eyes), or the colors, or the shapes.. I put it down, in part, to my using my eyes to get most of my input from the world (seeing, reading, etc.) and then using my hands for output (creating, communicating, writing, etc.). If I was still hearing, who knows, I might use the mouth and ears in my artwork.. but, to be honest, during my art career I haven't even thought of using them in imagery.. they just "don't compute", even with all the oral training sessions I had to endure as a child <g>
With Cosmic Checkers, as I look at it now, I notice the open and closed eyes. Open= receptive to the world, willing to participate and assimilate information; closed=blind to the world around you, whether willfully or unintentionally. This works for me very well as a Deaf person, although I don't think a hearing person would "get" it as much.. and would it be relevant to a blind person? I think the first time I showed the artwork, I had the closed-eye sides up.. as the game progressed, if a checker reached the last row and was "kinged", it would receive an open eye on top. But you can show it with either open or closed eyes up.
Thanks for asking these questions.. it made me think, and gave me some inspiration! Let's see what pops up next after the inner recesses of my mind have had time to digest this information..