This New York test sheet foregrounds textual elements—fragmentary words, partial names, scribbled letters testing pen flow. The illegible and semi-legible text creates what linguists might call "asemic writing"—mark-making that resembles language without communicating specific meaning. Sukan's documentation preserves these linguistic ghosts, transforming customers' mundane pen tests into poetic fragments. The work emphasizes how test papers become "vehicle for both intimate and exhibitionist performance"—someone's private handwriting practice now publicly displayed, their casual scribbles elevated to artistic content.
 
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 written traces fragments preserve linguistic ghosts—scribbled writing tests transformed from commercial ephemera into poetic social document. Archival pigment print from Public on Paper. Available at The Art Design Project, Miami Beach.