Notwithstanding the image above, Buffalo-based Joan Linder does not work for Amazon, though in a sense she is herself an Amazon, a truly formidable artist-qua-cultural-warrior and a bit of a nut. My kind of artist and my kind of nut. She looks, looks harder still, notices, notices yet more, and in so doing helps, or at any rate invites, the rest of us as well to see. These boxes, for starters, are all hand-made, exquisitely observed and then painstakingly rendered--meticulously inked, painted and watercolored on archival cotton paper which then gets folded up in exact-size replicas: scuffed corners, digitized address labels, smeared waterstains and all.
As such, they comprise the latest of Linder’s forays into the confounding material culture comprising the actual lived reality across which we as frenziedly consumed consumers measure out our lives today (her practice’s version of what it must have been like, say, for Caillebotte and the other impressionists when they took to centering trains and railway bridges and newly widened boulevards and strutting boulevardiers and achingly stretching laundresses and other such overworked laborers as their subjects).
Ossining-born (1970), a veteran of Columbia, Skowhegan, Tufts, and Grinnell, Linder has been based for many years now in rust-belt Buffalo, hardly the most aesthetically promising of sites for free-range exploration, one might have thought—yet in that regard she keeps proving us wrong. It would seem that she must be drawing all the time. A few years back she trained her gaze and ink-pen on the aftermath of the post-industrial wasteland surrounding the onetime neighborhood of Love Canal, by way of a series of long narrow scrolls, accordioned in on themselves in elegant artist’s books, documenting the screened-off perimeter of the abandoned, overgrown site. This time out she does the same thing with a series of walks around the grungy rusting remains of onetime manufacturing powerhouses, such as the carcass of the American Axle factory, newly converted, it would seem, to the sites of rumbling throbbing barely-inhabited albeit massively energy-consuming bit-coin crypto-mining operations and cloud-computing server farms—and then as well, the impoverished neighborhoods just on the other side of the street into which they have all been slotted.
