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Seattle-based designer and illustrator
Shawn Wolfe is best known as the man behind BeatkitTM. The so-called
"brand without a product" has served as inspiration for
the improbable RemoverInstallerTM as well as the artist’s global
"Panic Now" campaign, paintings, t-shirts, comics, sculpture
and performance. Wolfe’s work, which tends to focus on deconstructing
and reconstructing consumerism and brand fetishism, has appeared
in many publications and is featured in Next: The New Generation
in Graphic Design (North Light Books). He has designed album packages
for the culture-jamming performance group Negativland and counts
K2, Sony, Island/Def Jam, Listen.com, Neverstop, Dawls and Chelsea
Films among his clients. A monograph of his work, Uncanny (Houston)
was published in 2000.
Life at the Point of Sale
Shawn Wolfe will present his work and discuss his "life at
the point of sale." Wolfe is best known as the man behind BeatkitTM,
the canny "brand without a product." An exercise in futility
on the surface, Wolfe's genre of brand building amounts to one man's
attempt to defray the psychic costs of living a branded existence.
By utilizing the tools of the marketing trade—graphic design
and crafty adspeak—to give voice to a numb desolation that
only advertising itself could foster, Wolfe has found a way to use
advertising to communicate something personal outside the dictates
of the marketplace. Products like his absurdist RemoverInstallerTM
with its global "Panic Now" campaign go beyond adbusting
and subvertising, drawing the spotlight away from the Nikes and
Disneys of the world and focusing attention on the sheer madness
that underlies life lived in a culture where market values are the
only enduring and hallowed values remaining.
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