Scale Maps of the Ocean Floor: linn meyers, Jenene Nagy, and Marc Pally

The artworks included here examine our perception of time’s passage, and they question our concepts of scale. linn meyers, Jenene Nagy, and Marc Pally all make labor intensive abstractions. Their practices straddle the line between drawing and painting. The accumulated marks and materials on their surfaces immediately make the time spent making them clear. The human presence and repeated physical motions embedded in the artworks is evident. 

Over the hours, days, and weeks spent realizing these pieces, the compositions grow intuitively, expanding and enlarging, yet always with a focused precision. They are devoid of intentional narratives, yet seem encoded with information. They are charting something not fully known or understood, but implied. These cartographic endeavors may not result in legible facts or distinct answers, but a certain shrouded information is still evident, and in the process of experiencing these works there is a way to better understand the world. The idea of the ocean floor here is a metaphor for the inscrutable, paralleling deep internal sensations, where simmering proto-thoughts are forming, but are not always able to be articulated. The time spent on these works allows the artists to mine these depths, to somehow visually record these churning feelings or observations.

Marc Pally’s works reminds us of the astounding structural congruities in the universe over logarithmically increasing scales, yet remain resolutely abstract. His improvisational graphite gestures grow without a set course or plan, like coral spreading over the cloudy sea of layered painted surfaces. Colors deep below the surface reveal themselves, further inviting viewers into the strata of these worlds. In a recent catalog essay, Constance Mallinson writes of his marks that “the associations seem endless: finely veined leaves, hairy roots, mycelia, vital organs, helical and molecular chains, drapey vines, amoebas, planaria, cross sections of plant and animal tissue, insects, reptiles, sea creatures, algae, entrails.” They “simultaneously evoke tiny cells and galactic events”. They demonstrate the importance of interconnectedness, nothing and no one being in a vacuum, everything is tied together and interdependent. 

Jenene Nagy embraces repetition and devotion in her process, leading to artworks that slow the viewing experience. She asks her audience to fully engage in “the simple act of looking, to acknowledge their place in time as they contemplate an accrual… the artworks are a record of seeking the slightly out of reach, the waiting to be discovered.” Although, as Dan Beachy-Quick noted in Artforum “… her sense of time does not center around an accumulation of hours demarcating life into the fateful tenses of future, present, and past. Nagy’s investigation is an experiment in thinking about the passage of days differently, in which the planet’s turn around the sun doesn’t bring us simply to another year, but takes us back to the point from which we began, returning us to our origin, a place in which creation is ongoing, mythical, and somehow—impossible to explain—eternally nascent.” Where there is always room for renewal, perpetual new possibilities. Her ‘mass’ series are made from strips of paper being treated with graphite paint made by the artist and collaged into horizontal and vertical patterns. Moments of relief where the strips intersect generating subtile patterns. In her ‘Dusk” works Nagy creates a firm and classic grid, but the subtile variations of each daub of paint, filling each square, reveal an unmistakable human touch;  “..necessary and revelatory errors that teach us to love this errant world”, as Mr. Beachy-Quick adroitly observed.

linn meyers strikes a visual balance between structure and fluidity to ground a deeper exploration of control and spontaneity, of how we react to and digest events around us “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… each one a record of the constellations of decisions, mistakes, tensions, and interventions that adhere to each mark… these paintings hold together the monumental and microscopic forces and feelings that creation, labor, and daily experience all share…” -Dr. Jordan Amirkhani. meyer’s works on vintage graph paper featured in this exhibition are made up of thousands of meticulously ordered hand-drawn lines. The gridded forms give a feeling of stability, anchor points that prove subversive as she proceeds to explore the unseen. She revels in the imperfections of her her human touch, highlighting the cracks in perfect systems, prying at the seams. Entropy and structure remain balanced in the work, but their give and take is importantly acknowledged. Her works rally against the ever-increasing speed and scale of the world in which we are living, they tenderly ask for closer and more nuanced inspection. Not just of themselves, but everything else too.

These three artists offer a dialogue between the measurable and the immeasurable. They show patterns and forms coalescing into new universes, and subsequently breaking down. A repeated cycle of ideas and feelings exploding into and out of existence.