Collected from New York art supply stores, this work features dense linear accumulation—pen strokes, line weights, and gestural tests creating palimpsest-like surface. The accumulated marks represent what Sukan describes as straddling "the line between private notation and public expression"—each stroke was private test of pen quality, yet collectively they form inadvertent public artwork. The density suggests New York's creative energy and commercial volume, where more customers testing more tools create thicker visual archaeology of creative commerce.
 
Sukan has set out to identify alternative sites of public display and common space within the banal recesses of the everyday world. Collecting and adopting the sketch pads and papers that customers use for testing markers, pens, and other drawing tools at art supply stores through the years, from different cities around the world, Sukan considers how these test sheets serve as a vehicle for both intimate and exhibitionist performance as well as original social documents. In the improvised layers of sketches, doodles, and drawings that fill the pages, Sukan sees the documents of a ritual that approximates the practices of graffiti art but makes no allowance for participation in a common culture. Unlike palimpsest or open-sourced editing platforms where history can be scraped clean and updated, the sketch pages collapse past and present straddling the line between private notation and public expression. His transformation of these sketch-filled pages suggests that while the artist offers another voice, it is one capable of giving form to that which litters the surface of the things.
 
New York gestural line accumulation documents urban creative energy—private pen tests becoming collective visual archaeology. Photography from Public on Paper series. Available at The Art Design Project, Miami Beach.