Artist puts purchases on display in gallery

As a graduate student, Kate Bingaman kept all her receipts. In fact, she even took photographs of items she purchased, all the way down to a pack of gum. But it wasn't because she's a stickler for balancing her checkbook; it's because she's an artist.\nBingaman's Obsessive Consumption exhibit, located in the School of Fine Arts Green Room, runs through Jan. 21. She will lecture on her work and exhibit from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Friday in the Fine Arts building, Room 102. \nBingaman, an assistant professor of graphic design at Mississippi State University, decided to document all of her purchases in graduate school simply to track the amount of money she spent consuming just about anything.\nSmall photographs of everything she bought during graduate school, all the way down to a Scotch-Brite Lens Cleaning Cloth, line the wall while rows and rows of bank statements reveal the spending of consumers and the tight grip credit card companies have on them.\nThe idea was hatched when her job as a graphic designer for a gift company in Omaha, Neb., revealed to her the fickle nature of consumers and the sheer volume of the things they consume. \n"It was amazing to see what people bought," Bingaman said. "What was hot, what was not. So I quit my job and went to grad school where I became obsessed with trying to find out the history of objects."\nBefore completing her master's degree in fine arts in 2004, she began documenting all of her purchases by keeping receipts and photographing the things she bought. Bingaman's exhibit is a personal documentary of her own habitual consumption. \nIan Whitmore, the SoFA gallery designer and a longtime friend of Bingaman, said the exhibit is playful on the surface. \n"The playfulness draws you in because it's visual eye-candy," he said. "But once you get into the content, it is an obsessive examination of the consumer culture and how (consumers) live and how they spend their money."\nHer current phase of "Obsessive Consumption" addresses credit card debt. She hand-copies every credit card statement she receives in the mail using funky fonts she thought up herself. She said she will continue to do so until each credit card is paid off.\nThough she hates credit cards, she said she recognizes that she would not have been able to further her work without them.\nBingaman's ideas are not lost on her viewers. \nSenior Victoria Battista, a painter in the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts, said she found the exhibit interesting because it was a different spin on something people do every day.\n"We are being hit over the head all the time with this stuff and don't even know it," Battista said. "We are just accepting these things are parts of life when we should pay attention to how they affect us."\nSome students are thoughtful about the implications of Bingaman's work.\nAlyssa Jaggers, a sophomore studio art major, said she feels the exhibit is an example of something of which she does not want to be a part.\n"It really makes you think about the idea, 'You are what you buy,'" Jaggers said. "I'm pretty anti-consumerist myself. At some point, I want to make clothes for myself and my family and not rely on sweatshops. My dad told me to get a credit card to establish credit, but I only got an ATM card because I just didn't want to end up spending too much money."\nBingaman said often her design classes turn into credit counseling sessions, and she finds herself answering numerous questions about how credit works. She said she constantly learns from her artwork and loves the prospect of presenting this side of culture while not necessarily finding a solution.\n"I just want to keep on making work," Bingaman said. "I don't ever want to stop. Is there a solution to obsessive consumption? For me? No. I love obsessive consumption. I don't want a solution. Then I would be done making artwork. Bring on the grossness of consumer culture. The funniness. The ridiculousness. The insanity. I love it all"