Joan Linder ’96 Unveils Solo Show 'Fulfillment' at Cristin Tierney 

Visual Arts alumna Joan Linder ’96 has launched her first solo exhibition with Cristin Tierney Gallery. The exhibition, titled Fulfillment, is open through August 9, 2024.

Fulfillment features Linder’s drawings, video, and sculptures, forming a multimedia installation. The exhibition explores the hidden aspects of e-commerce, cloud computing, crypto-mining, and the legal contracts that bind us to these technological systems. According to the exhibition pamphlet, Linder uses pen and paper to reconnect the digital world with tangible nature, expressing her simultaneous fascination and horror with digital systems of transaction and communication.

Linder’s work is based on observation. For this exhibition, she visited e-commerce sites in Buffalo and Niagara, NY, where she drew the sites from her car. The resulting collection includes accordion books of drawings depicting crypto-mining warehouses, cloud computing server farms, fulfillment centers, and surrounding neighborhoods in Buffalo. These landscapes are complemented by hand-drawn facsimiles of “terms of service” and “email communications” from digital platforms like Amazon and Meta.

Completing the exhibition are Linder’s handmade paper reproductions of discarded Amazon shipping boxes. Made from ink, paint and watercolor on archival cotton paper, the boxes are life-size and form near-perfect replicas of the actual objects. Each box carries marks that trace and reflect their material history, from supply chain to fulfillment center to user. “In examining the multiple components of the e-commerce supply chain,” the exhibition pamphlet explains, “Fulfillment highlights the heavy physical toll carried by our digital behaviors.”

Joan Linder (b. 1970, Ossining, NY) is known for her labor-intensive drawings that contain thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of tiny lines. She has exhibited at Albright College, Faulconer Gallery at Grinnell College, Queens Museum of Art at Bulova Corporate Center, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Omi International Art Center, Institute of the Humanities at University of Michigan, Sun Valley Art Center, University of the Arts, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College and more.