Untitled, Thrift 2006 (0635), by Brian Ulrich

Hello, my collector friends and welcome to the very last 20x200 edition of 2007. We were originally scheduled to bring you the photographic stylings of Mr. Ulrich yesterday, but a sudden surge in popularity make site operations a little hinky. Many thanks to VSL and design*sponge among others, for too much of a good thing.

Back to the business at hand! Today I am really very pleased and thrilled to present to you Untitled, Thrift 2006 (0635), a digital c-print by Brian Ulrich available exclusively to 20x200 collectors. The edition is available in 3 sizes and each print comes with a Certificate of Authenticity signed and numbered by the artist:

10"x8"
Edition of 200 each $20.

22"x17"
Edition of 20 each $200.

40"x30"
Edition of 2 each $2000.

Your heart might be newly set on giving the gift of Thrift for the holidays. If so, email shipping@20x200.com to inquire about Express Shipping (something we'll soon offer regularly, but we're not quite there yet.)

Being able to offer such an affordable edition from someone as widely exhibited and published as Brian is pretty much rocks. He was one of the first people to express interest in participating in the project when I started talking about it back in April, and I was naturally keen to bring him on board.

I've known Brian since the early days of the gallery. Referred to me by The Soth, Brian first showed me his amazing work back in 2003 or so. I loved the photos and thought Brian was most swell, but my wee gallery wasn't really spacious enough for his big, beautiful prints.

Regardless of that, a friendship was forged. We became blog buddies and he wrote me one of the most fabulous recommendation letters I've ever seen, introducing me to Alice Wells, a beloved member of the JB family to this day. Brian finally, at long last, exhibited at the gallery this past Summer in an exhibition I co-curated with Jörg Colberg, A New American Portrait.

This photo is from Brian's Thrift series, a subset of his ongoing project about American consumerism Copia. I have a long history of scouring thrift stores for pottery and housewares. My friend Kim and I have spent hours wandering from Goodwill to Salvation Army in the gritty post-industrial landscape of upstate NY's northern counties. Thrift conjures up memories, albeit in a scary movie sort of way, of the long days spent in a rattly Civic wagon on the hunt for overlooked treasures.

The photos in this series trigger the creeping claustrophobia I often feel when rifling through shelves of grubby glassware and tchotckes. It's not just the "OMG! Cooties!" skin-crawly feeling of pawing other people's stuff that gets me. It's also how much of it there is (so! much!) and how it makes me feel (guilty) about everything I consume and discard myself.

My ambivalence about consumption is on high alert this time of year. I love gift giving (not to mention getting) but always recoil sometime in this latter part of December as the buy! buy! buy! imperative reaches its inevitable fever pitch.

Unsurprisingly, art is the gift I'm giving this year, and as I see it, it's pretty much guilt free. Generally speaking, art's a keeper. Aside from that, supporting artists is vital and feels awfully good. As I've been saying since 2003, I really and truly believe that living with art is good for you.

So give good this holiday season. There's lot to love in our archives and though we can't guarantee it, Priority shipments that go out today and tomorrow have a good chance of making it under the tree in time. If you want to be absolutely sure that you don't show up empty handed, gift certificates are just the thing.

I want to sign off with a big fat THANK YOU to you, our collectors, for your enthusiastic response to 20x200. I've gotten so many amazing emails and had so many awesome conversations with people about how happy they were to get their art.

As I can personally attest, the joy of collecting art is sometimes hard to get until you actually have some art in your hot little hands. But when you do get it, wowsers. I love thinking about 20x200 prints going up on hundreds of walls, making the lives of the people living within them a little richer.

Here's to a great 2008, rich with art for everyone.