Mediated

On Saturday I paid a visit to the PDX Zinefest that was held over the weekend over at PSU.  The Smith Ballroom was filled with tables of zinesters with their offerings – an overwhelming array of publications!  Zines these days cover just about anything – some are like mini-comics, some offer short stories and prose, some have practical information, some have artsy graphics, and some combine all of the above.  The Multnomah County Library has quite a big collection of zines, so they were there as well, and they took the Polaroid above of me with the big library card.

At the festival, I also had a chance to meet Kate Bingaman-Burt, whose work I’ve followed for a few years now.  She does work that deals with consumerism at a personal level.  She started by making drawings of her credit card bills (when she found herself getting deep into debt), and then shifted to doing a series of daily drawings called ‘What did you buy today?’.  Kate now lives in Portland, and teaches at PSU, while increasingly showing her work in galleries.

Earlier in the day I stopped in at Reading Frenzy, where they are offering lots of Kate’s work, including most of the daily purchase drawings.  I bought one of the very first ones, from February 7, 2006, a drawing of a box of banana cream pudding, shown above.  She was nice enough to give me a copy of the zine that contains that drawing, shown below.