On a windblown day in Brooklyn, Joan Linder nestles in her cold basement studio while her bundled baby alternately coos and frets in her arms. Pinned to a November-gray wall is a spectacular and meticulous lifesized drawing of a toilet. Elsewhere are other products of Linder's bold and patient hand and slightly morbid imagination: comic-book-style sketches of a bunny's pornographic adventures; a couple of dissected body parts. Despite the subject matter and the temperature, the studio feels electrified by the energy of her work.
Linder, whose show "Of Bodies and Buildings" is up through Dec. 9 at the Anthony Giordano Gallery at Dowling College in Oakdale, takes a snake's attitude toward art, shedding each successive medium and subject in order to grow and change. At 37, she has accumulated an ambitious catalog of accomplishments: a respectable Manhattan gallery, a tenure-track job at the University at Buffalo, a newborn. She's taken the time along the way to find a narrow topic and then probe its intricacies before moving on.
She has drawn each piece of furniture in her apartment to scale, studied the grotesque, oddly beautiful forms of human organs, and captured the fraught climate of family gatherings. A constant is her ability to inject subtle vitality into ropes, plants, trees, buildings.
