Amy Myers, Daughter Universe, 2019, oil on canvas.
Amy Myers, A Dream Perimeter - Dimensional Inter-Repetition, 2019, oil on canvas.
Amy Myers, Its Own Array (In Perpetuity), 2019, gouache on silk.
Amy Myers, Initial String, Untethered, 2019, oil on canvas.
Amy Myers, Holoacoustics, 2019, gouache on silk.
Amy Myers, SilviUniverse, 2019, oil on canvas.
Amy Myers, The Mirrored Daughter - Dimensional Inter-Repetition, 2019, oil on canvas.
Amy Myers, A Precise Song - Ad Infinitum, 2019, gouache on silk.
And in each daughter universe, there is a copy of you witnessing one or the other outcome, thinking - incorrectly - that your reality is the only reality.
Columbia University physicist Brian Greene -
Malin Gallery is pleased to present Amy Myers: Daughter Universes. On view in New York through November 16th, Daughter Universes is the first exhibition to focus on the artist's paintings. The exhibition features five large-scale oil paintings on canvas accompanied by series of smaller gouache paintings rendered on silk.
Known for her intricate large-scale drawings, Amy Myers creates elaborate images replete with visual allusions to various fields of scientific inquiry including cosmology, theoretical physics, ontology, neuroscience, anatomy and physiology. As the daughter of a scientist and an aviator, Myers was raised in an environment suffused with scientific theory and empiricism. Coexisting with the ratiocinative elements of Myers' images are spiritual, ethereal and meditative qualities and a pervasive femininity. Employing the concept of the multiverse derived from theoretical physics as a "springboard into the imagination," Myers strives to render ineffable dimensions or states of being, describing her artistic visions as "fluid to the point of indeterminacy and infinite to the point of transcendence.”
While Myers’ approach to depicting mass and form is deeply informed by consideration of subatomic dynamics, the primacy of negative space within her work simultaneously evokes the celestial. Thus, her images collapse and commingle the infinitely microscopic and macroscopic in a manner that cannot be disentangled by the viewer, with his or her perspective constantly shifting between the universe in a grain of sand or the universe itself in its infinite expanse.
Central to Myers’ approach is the concept of the multiverse derived from theoretical physics and closely associated with string theory. Erwin Schrödinger introduced his “lunatic” notion of the multiverse in 1952, when he suggested that the universe may encompass "multiple histories” that “are not alternatives, but all really happen simultaneously.” The notion of the multiverse allows stretches toward the elusive unified theory that reconciles all space, energy, time and matter within one overarching conceptual framework. Immune to empirical evaluation, the idea of a multiverse has generated many variations. The title of the exhibition is taken from one of these versions of the multiverse: the concept of daughter universes. Rooted in quantum mechanics’ insistence on probability and indeterminance, one conception of the multiverse suggests that all possible outcomes of a given event do occur in parallel but in separate “daughter” universes.
