Joan Linder Unboxes Truth and Consequences of Crypto-Mining in “Fulfillment” at Cristin Tierney

For all the tough subjects explored and the dingy wares exhibited, this show is rather beautiful.

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.

Her drawings, at over ten feet long each, were made on location while the artist stealthily sat in her car outside key crypto mining facilities and e-commerce hubs in upstate New York. Digihost American Axle, East Delavan, Buffalo is one such work. It features an elongated, elegant sketch––reminiscent of Ed Ruscha’s panoramic All the Buildings on Sunset Strip photo book—of the homely, curious, ramshackle collection of buildings that make up the titular operation’s site. Another drawing, titled Pentecostal Deliverance/Joseph J. Kelly Gardens, is a depiction of public housing across from another noisy crypto site. The simple, somber, brick residential buildings, leafless fall trees and parked economy automobiles offer a colorless melancholic sense of life. The accordion folds of the drawings—which enable easy collapse into a single volume––cast interesting shadows on the matter-of-fact renderings, giving them a three-dimensional pop-up book reality. Importantly, figures are conspicuously absent in these drawings, steering us to concentrate more on the poor conditions of mining production than its direct effect on people nearby, rendered helpless as conceptual ghosts. But what are some of those conditions that seem to cause mounting issues loosely alluded to in the work? And where are the people? Luckily, a few clues to the puzzle are close at hand.

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There’s a pertinent video in the next room, titled 24/7, with a pervasive humming sound that at once alerts and numbs our senses. With a running time of 7:44, the footage presents a series of static clips showing power lines, fulfillment warehouses, cargo trailers, depressing industrial digs and, finally, the downtrodden neighborhoods right next door—now implicitly pointing, in clear color video imagery, to the human casualties affected by the mechanical battle rattle of crypto mining. As a mere viewer of the massive rotating factory vent fans and listener of the droning noises playing on a small, wall-hung monitor, I finally can understand why symptoms like vertigo, headaches and anxiety attacks could easily result in real life. The video makes me feel like I’m there.

But above these hints and signs, the most unmistakable feature of the exhibition is the eerie closed-door mystery enshrouding all the locations depicted. The sobering, unpopulated, continuous scenes on paper and in video show us Linder’s POV–instead of painful emergency room moments or dramatic Erin Brockovich–style town hall showdowns, we’re exposed to a vast meditative expanse of human-made architecture to help us brace, ironically, for the mounting cacophony of human-made environmental violations. Perhaps the artist simply wants to show us just how enormous and overwhelming the whole damn thing is.

In addition to the industrialscape drawings and video, the exhibition includes copies of service terms pages and email exchanges from Amazon and Meta, transcribed by hand. They seem to deal in matters that enable these tech giants to absolve themselves from certain legal responsibilities. Also featured are letters between the artist and Amazon when the company shut her personal account down for ostensibly violating those terms. Like the landscapes, these exchanges are largely devoid of humanity. However, there is one place where “people” show up in the artist’s work. Linder jotted down the names of curious residents she met and spoke with while she was drawing—many of whom live on the blocks depicted. You’ll have to go check out the work in person at the gallery to find these particular Easter eggs.

And then, of course, there’s Linder’s handmade paper renditions of discarded Amazon shipping boxes, which are the showstoppers. Crafted with ink, paint and watercolor on paper, these 1:1 replicas faithfully mirror their real-world counterparts, each bearing traces that chronicle their journey from production through delivery to buyer. By means of this painstaking dissection of the e-commerce supply chain, “Joan Linder: Fulfillment” underscores the substantial physical footprint of our very virtual digital interactions.

All of this, of course, generates a big why. Why make this work in this manner? Why lovingly attend the replication of an Amazon box by hand? Why go backward—away from the automation that created it? We stand at a critical crossroads of production and consumption globally. Anyone with token currency or a credit card can place an order online in seconds and, a day or two later, materialize their wish and indulge the delivered results with impunity. They can, essentially, experience fulfillment—or, at least, it momentarily feels like that for a majority of users. Linder, on the other hand, it seems, feels responsible as an artist, mother, wife and connected community member to shine a light on the underbelly of the industrial beast in all our backyards. The overall gesture of her works feels like a way to delay the harried, hell-bent, no-turning-back trajectory we seem to be riding upon that produces massive plastic garbage islands in our oceans and mutant nuclear meltdown wildlife. Her art is as much an homage to the better-or-worse way we live and the lives of others we care about as it is a question concerning the operations that compromise our well-being.

For all the tough subjects explored and dingy wares exhibited, “Joan Linder: Fulfillment” is a rather beautiful and, dare I say, beneficial show in its own modest, mostly muted way. Experiencing the works, I took steady breaths and paced myself while navigating many nooks and crannies along the bounty of boxes, looking across the handsome protracted book drawings and watching the uncanny video—which was just long enough to keep me curious but not too long to turn me off. Perhaps it is Linder’s gift to give us just enough art to simmer our blood and pique our interest about critical ideas but not too much to burn our bravery and shut us out of the here-and-now reality to which we are—or should be—inherent participants. After all, boxes aren’t just packed, labeled and shipped. They are meant to be opened and their contents enjoyed.

“Joan Linder: Fulfillment” is at New York’s Cristin Tierney Gallery through August 9.