Houston is proud to present Uncanny by Shawn Wolfe. This 166-page full-color book documents the rise and fall of Wolfe's Beatkit "anti-brand" project and is also a retrospective of the artist's design and illustration work spanning over a decade.

Wolfe has described Beatkit as "an advertisement for its own future uselessness." In all fairness though, Beatkit is a very useful if not extremely amusing and thought-provoking exploration of the contemporary phenomenon of Branding. With no product to sell and nothing too terribly comprehensible to say, Beatkit is devised in such a way as to stand in high-relief against a backdrop of rampaging consumerism, fierce loyalty and the godless gospels of advertising in general. Beatkit's slogan, "Until 2000" is intended as a promise to a weary world, suggesting that Beatkit itself will do the right thing and self-terminate, putting us all just a little bit out of our misery.

Uncanny is a showcase of Wolfe's Beatkit posters, t-shirts, stickers and videos as well as the artist's many painted canvases, all of which relate in some way to an obsession with the vicious (and oftentimes insane) circles we all, as consumers, are made to circulate in.

Uncanny The Art & Design of Shawn Wolfe ISBN 0-9671285-1-X $20.00 7" x 10" Paperback 166pp Published by Houston ©1999 Shawn Wolfe/Houston Sold at Houston + other fine establishments Available February 2000

Introduction by Rudy Vanderlans of Emigre Magazine With interview by Negativland's Mark Hosler Additional text by designer David Carson, cartoonist Tony Millionaire, designer Darick Chamberlin, and The Stranger art critic Eric Fredericksen. More | Less