Fourteen objects from the Microsoft Office 97 clip-art library, all of one subject: the workplace. The show collects the genre's stock figures — the businessman, the handshake, the meeting, the desktop computer, the printer, the telephone — the categories a mid-1990s office reached for when it needed to picture itself. What follows is that vocabulary, not any single portrait within it.

The interest of this material is its circularity. This imagery shipped bundled with a productivity suite — Word, Excel, PowerPoint — and its working purpose was to furnish the memos, overhead transparencies, and printed newsletters produced in exactly the kind of office it depicts. The clip art of the 1996 workplace was drawn to be pasted into the documents of the 1996 workplace. It is a self-portrait, made by the tool, of the room the tool sat in: a stock vocabulary of professionalism — the tie, the handshake, the meeting, the terminal — offered back to the professionals who would spend it.

Read at the distance of thirty years, the vocabulary has aged into evidence. The monitors are deep and beige, the telephones are corded, the desks are stacked with paper a later office would keep on the screen. None of it was intended as documentary; all of it now reads that way. This is the vernacular iconography of white-collar work at the exact moment before the web reorganized it, preserved not because anyone drew it well but because everyone used it.