RESEARCH_JUSTINGIGNAC

Justin Gignac describes himself as a 'recovering advertising art director’, his work NYC Garbage began as a bet to a friend about the importance of packaging to design in it’s role to sell a product. That idea became NYC Garbage which appears to be part art project, part social experiment, and this project soon became a thriving self-set side business. Gignac self-set project is now critically acclaimed and his resulting projects have seen him become self sufficient as a result of his self-set projects, and his ‘Entrepreneurial” ventures. This is a perfect example of Almeida and McCarthy (2011) where they describe how entrepreneurial ventures can become a controlling and dictating part of personal practice. 

It would be rude to assume NYC Garbage is merely an entrepreneurial project, the project plays with people’s perception of value. This seems to be resonant in a lot of successful self-set work by originally commercial creatives. The work holds a functions as a commercial product, but there seems to be an underlying message that questions human tendency on a deeper level that could be likened to art.

Another one of Gignac’s projects is Want’s For Sale/Needs For Sale. Wants For Sale was started in July 2007 by Christine & Justin Gignac. All of the paintings on Wants For Sale are the price of the actual item shown in the painting, whether that’s “A Slice of Pepperoni Pizza” for $3.00 or “A Gold Watch” for $287.19. After each painting is sold, the original wanted item is purchased and photographed for this very website you are on right now.

Prices of paintings can range anywhere from $0 to $1,000,000 and may be of general wants or part of a series like “A Vegas Vacation” or “As Seen On TV. Needs for Sale was started in November 2007 as a way to inspire others to help charities with the incentive of art. Each painting represents a need that we would like to fill. From toys for kids at Christmas, to food for the hungry, to building supplies for people who have lost their homes.

The projects really push the limits of what a creative person can do to become independent. All of these things are design/illustration products or art pieces, but a unique subjective viewpoint of their application is what makes them work in a innovative way. This is the type of thing that can only done, independent of a client brief, as it relies on an individual figure head to execute and present the idea. While I am sure there could be a mass scale commercial alternative to this, the nature of this self-set project really pushes the boundaries of what a creative person can do with their profession, and how they can out grow it’s traditional boundaries.