An artist book that combines diaristic documentation of objects informing liden’s work with installations and photography. Shopping bags, trash heaps, cigarettes, crumpled cash once carelessly stuffed into a pocket—each image is a trace of human existence specific to New York city and the shit it insouciantly peddles, an investigation of solipsism via purchased and discarded goods.

Liden’s sculptures of black plastic bags over-filled with poured plaster are a consideration of those accessories originally conceived to hide a pedestrian’s taboo purchase—a need specific to the urban environment. The black plastic bag was the solution, just as the trash bag hides refuse and the body bag makes even death discreet.

If Baudelaire’s flâneur experienced the city nomadically strolling with the idling freedom of observation, Liden’s experience is filled with the ubiquity of concealed vices, tenuous urban landscape, consumer-ridden civilization where there exists a commodification of even death. “Welcome to New York, thank you for dying here.”

Purchase Out of My Mind… Back in 5 Minutes.