Boxes. There are boxes everywhere. So many boxes. You could even say it’s kind of a mess. Except that this pile of signed, sealed and delivered cardboard is the pervasive variety of Amazon shipping boxes we all know too well––standing, lying, tipped and tilted along three display tables on the second floor of the Cristin Tierney Gallery. I suspect there’s a little bit more deliberation in play than an incidental pileup in the office mailroom or, perhaps, in your foyer at home. I lean in to look at one of these boxes, its edges ragged and stained, its face printed and stamped in lots of black and blue. This box has traveled long and far, I think. Wait a second. A sustained double take tells me I’m wrong. Everything on this box has been meticulously applied by hand in ink and paint. What care in handling. Across the way, on a narrow display ledge, sits an upright, accordion-style, mono-color drawing. It’s a long one, featuring a dry, continuous view of corrugated tin warehouses, chain-link fences and electrical substations. What do we have here exactly?
“Fulfillment,” a new exhibition by artist Joan Linder, peels back a few of the innumerable layers that make up the complex, not-so-enchanting land of cloud computing, electronic commerce and digital currency–mining operations. While not an explicit exposé of online warehouse work conditions, Bitcoin company misdeeds and purported health-hazard consequences now attaining major coverage in TIME and other news outlets, the artist gives us a low-key, slow-speed, very personal take of their effect on her and the people of the towns that neighbor her Buffalo, New York home. Linder, both mesmerized and deeply disturbed by the ethereal workings of digital transactions, loosely reestablishes these realms with a tactile turn of pen and paper for us to both see and feel their palpable presence.
