This project is based on my personal experience and informed by readings such as David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years, which posits that debt is the foundation of our culture.
For the last 10+ years I have been collecting the mailer credit cards that I receive from various banks and financial institutions in hope to ensnare another debtor. I started collecting them when I was separating from my former spouse, fearing that I might need them soon. Since all our mutual bank and credit card accounts were closing, banks figured out that we are financially separating. Female and financially insecure screamed across their predatory radar. I used to get 3-5 bank and credit card offers per week. I saved them all. Because they were pretty. Real plastic. Sleek design. Colorful. With blue oceans. Palms. Dolphins. Because they might save me from being a single mother and homeless. I have collected over 400 cards. None of them ever fulfilled their perfect lure to become real, real money, real debt.
My project Wallet:Desire is a testimony to a personal struggle yet it is also a testament of oppression; financially vulnerable individuals at the mercy of absurdly wealthy institutions. In my installation I usually display majority of my card collection in a glass case – years of slightly changed designs of American Express (Gold, Platinum, Business..), City, Capital One, Discover, cards with celebrities like Sylvester Stallone, with American flags, doves, four leaf clovers, with offers you can’t refuse. Cards that will bring you all that you desire.
Some cards I alter with drawings and paintings to transform them into wallet paintings. My alterations include icons from my personal language of digital symbols as well as one-square-inch close-ups of absurdly expensive paintings sold in recent history such as, When Will you Marry? by Paul Gauguin. My choice of imagery points to the way the value of specific artworks has skyrocketed while support for contemporary artists continues to diminish.
The cards are affixed to an offer letter that invites viewers to apply for the Wallet:Desire Card and receive a wallet painting of their own. The format and the text of the offer letter is only 5% changed from the original Wells Fargo Bank card offer. For example, “It will make you feel better and better” slogan on Wallet:Desire Card invitation is verbatim to Wells Fargo’s.
The Wallet:Desire project also has its own website – walletdesire.org, where potential customers/clients (in this case ‘art collectors’) can apply for a Wallet:Desire Card of their own. There is also an on-line shop page for special edition prints with various compositions where cards are arranged in pyramidal, rainbow, horizon, and pillow shapes.
This project also exists as a performance where Indira Martina Morre, Executive Vice President and Artist from Consumer Art Solutions alone or with her bankers are present in their bank/office space to solicit future clients. An alternative art fair and an art book fair recently held in San Francisco were perfect events for this performance. Although financial institutions’ predatory practices are now mainly in digital form, a handful of cards are still arriving in my mail.
