Joan Linder, Fulfillment at Cristin Tierney
The heart of this pleasingly brainy show is a bunch of haphazardly strewn cardboard Amazon packaging boxes. You don’t have to look too closely to see that these are facsimiles, labels and logos and stickers copied faithfully and meticulously, but very evidently the work of an artist. Nearby are long accordion-fold drawings of urban landscapes conveying the vast but unremarkable presence of e-commerce warehouses and server farms near Linder’s home in Buffalo, N.Y. In format, these are inspired by Ed Ruscha’s famous photo books of L.A. streets, but it’s significant that the latter are so cool and affectless while Linder clearly puts the emphasis on their identity of drawing, created over time, through observation. “Fulfillment” is very specifically about the dark matter of digital life, the physical infrastructure that the promise of immaterial and frictionless culture is meant to make you forget. And her emphasis on the hand very much feels like it is about thinking about what it means to try to get a grip on the sheer scale of all that for a physical, finite individual.
