Carbon Series: Untitled

Joshua Neustein’s Carbon Series drawings originate in childhood memories of the darkness, shadows, and brief flickers of light glimpsed while living in basements during World War II. Rather than representing such memories, however, Neustein has evoked the workings of memory itself. He took carbon sets—pieces of letterhead interspersed with carbon paper for the purpose of making copies—and folded, incised, and tore them. As a result, he explained, "the image is ‘unhinged’ from the material surface and circulates in unframed space, between parts of one pictorial plane or transferred between several pictorial planes." Neustein’s use of a common office product intended for the replication of documents draws upon the Duchampian tradition of the readymade but is lent added poignancy by the carbon set’s obsolescence in a world of photocopy machines and computers.