Cristin Tierney Gallery‘s latest exhibition feels less like an art show and more of a ubiquitous scene you’d find, well, on any street in the world. Stacks of boxes, many with Amazon’s smiley logo, sit across the Nolita space — like totems dedicated to an all-encompassing life-force that governs society’s compulsive spending habits.
Presented by New York-born, Buffalo-based artist Joan Linder, Fulfillment interrogates the “hidden-in-plain-sight” landscape of the binding commitments tied to technological systems: from e-commerce platforms to crypto mining. Linder, who is regularly known for her painterly depictions of figures and objects, felt both a fascination and a horror at the tangible byproducts of digital consumerism.
The artist parked outside of neighboring e-commerce sites around Buffalo and Niagara, NY, drawing in an accordion book of various fulfillment centers, cloud-computing centers and facsimiles of “terms of service” jargon from popular platforms, Meta and Amazon, amongst others. Created to replicate an actual delivery box, Linder’s iterations carry the “marks that trace and reflect their material history, from supply chain to fulfillment center to user,” wrote Cristin Tierney Gallery. “In examining the multiple components of the e-commerce supply chain, Fulfillment highlights the heavy physical toll carried by our digital behaviors.”
Fulfillment will be on view in New York until August 9, 2024.
