Joan Linder’s tools seem almost archaic. When the New York-based visual artist sits down to draw her large-scale images, she takes a quill pen and dips it in a bottle of ink.
While her contemporaries draft and create via computer, she patiently lets her pen guide each stroke in the formation of a work.
“The sleight or sloppiness of hand creates an awkward and intimate surface, which is compounded by the definitive and energized process of cross hatching,” she said in an artist’s statement.
Her work is almost a rebuke of our culture’s oversaturation of electronic imagery, and Linder describes her antiquated techniques as a way of creating “images that persist in exploring and claiming the sub-technological process of observation and mark making.”
At 7 p.m. on Nov. 24, Linder will discuss her works and their place in today’s culture during an artist lecture at Austin Peay State University’s Trahern Building, Room 401.
“My subjects include the banality of mass produced, domestic artifacts, the politics of war, sexual identity and power and the beauty disclosed in the close scrutiny of natural and man made structures,” she said in her artist statement. “The diversity of subject matter is a critical element in my attempt to express the complexity and variety of contemporary life.”
Several of her pieces, including life-size ink drawings of figures and objects, have been exhibited throughout the country, such as New York’s Riva Gallery, Chicago’s Rowland Contemporary and Pittsburgh’s American Jewish Museum.
The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, contact APSU associate professor of art Ken Shipley at 931-221-7325 or ShipleyK@apsu.edu.
