Linn Meyers at George Billis - New York

Quietly exploiting the translucency of her materials, Linn Meyers draws on small sheets of Mylar and nylon. Her trembling abstractions are usually two-tiered, allowing the viewer to perceive faint washes of color behind graphic scrims of lines, dots and pinpricks. Collectively titled "Strata," these 21 new works induce a contemplative excavation of their layered depths, as well as their intricate draftsmanship.

The patient viewer may gradually detect the predetermined systems that govern the execution of these drawings. In Gravity Studies (2002), vertical lines of ink are repeatedly drawn from top to bottom with single movements of Meyers's hand. Tightly compressed but never quite touching, these quivering striations clearly illustrate the challenge of their creation.

The artist's other graphic techniques are much less obvious. In several works she lays down short, vertical strokes in rows of 20. After completing each row, she begins another just below the last, always attempting to extend the directions of her preceding lines. Despite this systematic accumulation, the stitch-like marks are prone to human error and descend along slightly shifting axes, creating contractions and expansions across the drawings. In 3,153 (2002), for example, the titular number of black lines form a rippling square. Especially when layered against a haze of blue, these marks generate an aquatic sense of depth and movement. This sort of abstract illusionism brings to mind certain early canvases by Bridget Riley. Yet Meyers forsakes the mathematical precision of most Op art, and welcomes a more organic evolution of form.

Using a similar system of aggregate mark-making, Meyers builds drawings from tiny dots of ink or piercings of the top layer of Mylar. In such works, she typically identifies the corners of a small square with four touches of her pen or pin, then attaches additional squares to each side in an exponential fashion. The resulting patterns tend to adhere to a tight grid where the drawing was begun, and expand with increasing disorder. In the loveliest of these dot drawings, the bottom edges resolve themselves very unevenly and flutter like curtains lifting off the supports. Through works such as these, Meyers enlivens the modernist grid with a palpable pulse.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group