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Priceless.

Posted on September 21, 2007

Tonight at Jen Bekman, Kate Bingaman-Burt’s Obsessive Consumption opens. Kate does some fascinating work about consumer behavior — notably, her own. She documents most of her purchases through line drawings and photos. My favorite work is her credit card statement series. Along with many other types of receipts, she creates a line drawing of every credit card statement she receives, and sells it for the minimum amount due.

That’s a fascinating exercise about regressive value in art: typically, later editions in a series become more expensive. Here, the more successful the work is, the less expensive it becomes. Of course, there are ways to combat this: pay off some cards and focus purchases on one card. Or, you know, buy lots more stuff. Either way, it’s a lively dialectic, and provides a concrete record of value from the get go.

Jen’s branding (I didn’t develop the logo, though I am very fond of it) entails two outline boxes that encroach from the left and right, implying a continuation on the back side (we do this as often as practical). Logo and address block are in the two boxes. We vary colors (red, knockout white and grey) as need, with red being the dominant color. For the postcard (above) we took advantage of the particulars of Kate’s work approach, and she created the postcard as a single piece of art, rather than using a piece from the show and putting the logo over. Deciding to run with this, I trimmed out the logo art and we made custom letterhead for the press release and show materials (snippet below).

Kate is also doing the wall vinyl (instead of transfer letters, she hand-painted it), and even did the price list to imprint on the letterhead. The only thing we missed was the website (we still need to move the back end of Jen’s site from Web 1.0). Come by — don’t forget your credit card.

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