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 diagrammatic 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, Curator, Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought, New Orleans, LA
bio
linn meyers sees her work as an act of resistance to the ever-increasing speed and scale of the world in which we are living. She dedicates her practice to tenderness, and an unhurried, deliberate approach to image-making.
meyers makes paintings, drawings, prints, and large-scale, site-specific wall drawings. Systems of mark-making based on the grid – a structure that implies stability, organization, and uniformity – propel her compositions. The slippages and imperfection of her human touch inevitably challenge the order and predictability of the grid.
meyers earned her BFA from Cooper Union and her MFA from California College of the Arts. Her works have been included in exhibitions and permanent collections in public and private venues including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Drawing Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Amore Pacific Museum of Art in South Korea, and the British Museum, London, among others.
meyers has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and several grants from the DC Commission on the Arts. She has been Artist In Residence at The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, The Bemis Center in Omaha NE, Millay Arts in Austerlitz, NY, The San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, CA, Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ireland, Hayama Residency in Japan, Iris Project in Los Angeles, Flying Horse Editions in FL, and The Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, NM.
meyers currently divides her time between Washington, DC, and Los Angeles.