Questionnaire: Israel Lund

By Jessica Carroll

It’s a perspective to consider contemporary communication practice as centring around the “back and forth” — the way that the things we share while sitting on our computers all day are reciprocally served up, quantified, affirmed, or aggressively shut down. The screen printed pieces of New York’s Israel Lund speak easily to this communicative notion. His method of creating works by screen-printing images of photocopied images of photocopied images of photocopied images of photocopied images represents not just a conceptualist idea of repetition and subconscious creation but also points to the annals of unconscious clicking, typing, pulling, rolling, scrolling and the ultimate experimentation necessary to find out what you care about in what other people care about. While his work is beautiful and well-installed, its imprint is aesthetically impermeable. Its conception sits right there with you, on your Tumblr dashboard, chair pulled up so you’re touching knees, quickly scrolling past that selfie because you thought you saw a tit and you’re scared the librarian might throw you out.

Questionnaire is bi-monthly column that looks at the theatricalities/banalities of the lives of contemporary artists. Let this represent its first incentive effort. 

Name: Israel Lund
Age: 32
Height: 5’10”
Occupation: Artist Assistant
Location: New Brunswick, NJ, and Brooklyn, NY

Astrological sign: Sagittarius
Official URL(s): israellund.com, israellund.tumblr.com
Favourite colour: black
Favourite flower: Stargazer Lilies
Favourite sports team: Toy Machine
Favourite hero of history: Socrates?
Most overwhelming personality characteristic: reticence
Last person you spoke with: the librarian at the public library
What you ate for breakfast: coffee

Current artistic mandate: work
Favourite artistic material: information/”structures”
Ultimate, untimely dreams: I don’t remember my dreams
Idea of a great misery: a world with no coffee
Do you live off of your work?: only sometimes
How do you wish to die?: it might be cool to fall down a really deep hole, so deep that you die of old age on the way down
Where have you found your most consistent inspiration?: other people
What tabs are open on your browser currently?: Tumblr, YouTube: His Hero is Gone- Like Weeds, Thrasher Magazine, void(), gmail
Link to an image that you feel most accurately represents you: http://israellund.tumblr.com/post/4087021297