Documents
by Joan Linder
I draw medical, utility, and credit card bills (fine print and all) along with coupons, advertisements to local and chain stores, and correspondence from the government, federal and state. The work is an archive, simultaneously impersonal and deeply personal. In creating these mail drawings, I scrutinize texts that are rarely more than skimmed, discover insidious advertising along with a plethora of nonnegotiable one-way contracts. The pile of documents is an homage to the dying culture of print, a Walter Benjamin inspired play on the notion of reproduction. In Documents, I absurdly enact the role of scribe, a human copy machine
Joan Linder has shown in New York, London, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, and Denmark. Her work has been supported by fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the UCross Foundation. Currently, Linder is an associate professor in the University at Buffalo’s Department of Visual Studies.
Originally appeared in the online supplement to the Beyond Category issue 43.2-44.1