linn meyers
‘The tension between our carefully laid plans and the disruptions that inevitably occur is a universal constant. Individuals, communities, and countries must continually work to absorb new information and grapple with shifting circumstances. The events of the past year have been a dra-matic demonstration of these truths.
The space between chaos and organization is where beauty often lives. Each of my works begins with a clear and well-conceived plan, and then forces beyond my control take over. When I yield to those forces, unexpected elements appear - I refer to this as the “unplanned imperfect,” which is key to each piece’s process and outcome.
The first gesture in each painting defines the direction in which the entire image will evolve – each line or dot directly responds to the mark made just before. These works demand that I let go of preconceived ideas of how the compositions will develop; I allow the paintings to evolve independently of expectations. As each image grows, the marks amass to create pictures that are both still and moving, ordered and cha-otic, both pointing towards perfection and also wholly imperfect.’
- linn meyers, 2021
meyers is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, The Pollock Krasner Award, a Santo Foundation award, and five DC Commission on the Arts grants. She has been Artist In Residence at The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, The Bemis Center in Omaha NE, The Millay Colony in Austerlitz, NY, The San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, CA, Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ireland, and The Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, NM.
meyers’s work is in public and private collections throughout the US and abroad, including The National Gallery (DC), The Smithsonian American Art Museum, (DC), the Ballycastle Museum of Art (County Mayo, Ireland), The Hirshhorn Museum (DC), The National Museum of Women in the Arts, (DC), The Sheldon Museum of Art (NE), The Huntington Museum of Art (WV), The Phillips Collection (DC), The Academy Art Museum (MD), The Hammer Museum (CA), The New Britain Museum of American Art, (CT), The Bowdoin College Museum of Art, (ME), The Columbus Museum, (GA), and the Allentown Art Museum (PA).
meyers holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from the California College of the Arts.
Photo by Cathy Carver
Linn Meyers’s most recent series of paintings continue her deep engagement with the power and presence of the individual mark, and invite the viewer to acknowledge the artist’s body as the laboring force behind these painstakingly rendered works.
Made up of thousands of meticulously ordered hand-drawn lines and ecstatic arrangements of dots, meyers’s paintings point to diagram-matic visual languages outside the traditional scope of fine art such as topographical maps, cosmological charts, or psychological landscapes that seek an order or logic to chaotic phenomenon. And yet, a reminder that paintings archive the traces and actions of their maker, meyers’s paintings turn lines into drags, dots into touches, each one a record of the constellations of decisions, mistakes, tensions, and interventions that adhere to each mark.
While meyers’s new body of work is not narrative in a traditional sense, these paintings hold together the monumental and microscopic forces and feelings that creation, labor, and daily experience all share and ask us as viewer to unfurl those layers in discordant simultaneity.
Dr. Jordan Amirkhani
Professorial Lecturer, American University