The artist’s credit cards made into Military dog tags (Bloomingdales version here) in a Hermes tie box with certificate of authenticity
©Jay Batlle Inc. 2020
Four versions were created.
Exhibition history: Swell Metro Picture/Nyehaus/Petzel Galleries NYC 2010
Published:
Private American Collection
I got my first credit card from Wells Fargo Bank in High School to establish my credit and start my Sisyphean life of debt. I graduated college in 1998 with a Bachelor of Arts and $25,0oo of student loan debts. When I walked through the commons daily at U.C.L.A I was offered numerous opportunities to gain lines of credit from various corporations. I began to see that our generation was being drafted into debt, this was our war. After cutting the umbilical cord of academia I landed in New York City during the late nineties and financed my early life and works by maxing out credit cards. I decided to start to make sculpture to reflect the absurdity of this situation by taking post-minimal forms and transforming them into space that expressed or possibly represented the space of debt. Overdraft Protection merges credit cards into military dog tags, I hired an online company called Battle Zone to fabricate these series of dog tags to express different credit cards. The work was inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 historical novel titled the Scarlet Letter, wearing your public shame of debt around your neck as a fashion statement.