Thursday, June 5, 2008

Welcome!

Welcome to the 'Business Reply Spam' project. This is a creative arts project using simple hand-drawn pictures and junk mail envelopes.

How many times have your mailbox been stuffed with 'exclusive' offers of pre-approved lines of credit and other pieces of junk mail? Other than simply throwing it all away, what else can be done with them? After years of making extra trash, I decided to do something different.

We've all seen the insides of the junk mail. Usually accompanying the 'too good to be true' offer is an innocuous envelope that looks like this. You may not know, but the postage on the reply envelope is already paid for. All you have to do is lick it and send it back.

At first, I was just closing the envelopes and sending them back empty, thinking to myself, "That's how you stick it to the man!" After all, I was costing the soliciting companies a stamp's worth of frustration. But then I started thinking about the poor guy or gal whose job it was to open these envelopes. I know they probably don't care much about what's in the envelope and I wanted to change that.

I know what you're thinking, "Hey, why don't you send them a nasty letter to ruin their day?" Well, with a job like opening envelopes, I'm pretty sure their days aren't that awesome to begin with. Unless, that's their dream job...it could happen. Anyway, instead of taking a negative approach, I decided to go with something more positive and fun. So, instead of a note telling someone to go to hell, the envelopes are filled with hand drawn pictures, real and fake confessions, and the occasional bit of social commentary.

This project will probably evolve as time goes on, but for now it's just an outlet to be creative and turn the negative of junk mail into something to look forward to. I hope you enjoy reading these as much as I enjoy making them.

No comments: