From front paste-down: Journal of Evidence Weekly, Vol. 185

Leporello Moleskine notebook (143 x 95 mm.) with highly detailed ink drawings throughout, ink logo on upper cover. New York: 2019-20. The artist’s Journal of Evidence Weekly (J.E.W.) series began in late 1998. Since then, Wilner (b. 1959) has documented his daily travels on the subway by filling almost two hundred Moleskine notebooks with his impressions and caricatures of fellow commuters. The present volume captures the artist’s subway trips in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. "Wilner’s ongoing ‘Journal of Evidence Weekly’ offers an illustrated compendium of the artist’s travels around New York City. Contained within a dense network of interconnected lines (a style that echoes the structure of the city’s public transit system) are fragments of text documenting details of the starting point, destination and specific mode of transport taken, snippets of overheard conversations, conductors’ announcements, excerpts of music played by buskers or leaked from headphones, and the onomatopoeic sounds of the machinery. These are joined by figural representations of fellow passengers, executed in a manner that ranges from the hyper-realist to the grotesque (odd body parts fused together) and the fetishistic (isolated images of women’s chests, legs and feet). For Wilner, who works as a practicing psychiatrist, the accumulation of details taken from daily life allows him to search for the ‘hidden themes’ and ‘whispered melodies’ that exist in the unconscious. Taken as a whole, the Journals read as a fractured map of reality that incorporates the psychologically fraught operations of looking with the mundane sights and sounds of intercity travel."–from the Morgan Library & Museum online catalogue. Examples of the Journal of Evidence Weekly are part of the following collections: The Morgan Library and Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry (now at the University of Iowa), Whitney Museum of American Art, The Jewish Museum, Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Fundação de Serralves (Porto), Vassar Art Library, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, The Cartin Collection, The West Collection, and Warner Brothers. In excellent condition.…