Joan Linder uses pen and ink to create labor intensive, often life-size drawings that transform mundane subjects into conceptually rich images. In this gallery exhibition at Art Omi, Linder will exhibit drawings created over the last 10 years depicting spaces in Linder's own home and the homes of her family.
The exhibit will include Sink, a 13-foot-long accordion-fold book that splays open to reveal a life-size drawing of Linder's complete kitchen counter with the kitchen sink acting as a loaded symbol of labor, accumulation, and time. Also included will be Still Life, a 10 x 10 foot drawing, showing laden shelves in Linder's parents' basement with stocks of canned food, appliances and mementos from their past.
Documents consists of meticulously recreated drawings of over 100 pieces of mail. Forming a meditation on daily anxiety, Linder draws medical, utility and credit card bills, 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. Linder writes, "A personal scrutiny, through drawing, of my immediate surroundings becomes an examination of a larger, contemporary, American experience: I transform the personal to the political. New life situations, my changing perceptions and observations, lead me to close examination and critical interpretations."
Joan Linder was born and raised in suburban New York. Linder has exhibited throughout the US and in Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Japan and Korea at venues including White Columns, NY; the Queens Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; and the Gwanjgu Art Museum, Korea. Awards include residency fellowships at Art Omi, MacDowell Colony, Smack Mellon Studios, Villa Montalvo, Yaddo, and a grant from the Pollock Krasner Foundation. Born in New York, Linder attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received and MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from The School if the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University. Linder is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Buffalo, SUNY. She currently lives and works in Buffalo, NY.
Drawn Home by Joan Linder appears courtesy of Mixed Greens.