Amy Myers

Malin Gallery | Aspen is pleased to present Amy Myers: A Hydromelodic Event. On view through July 23rd, the exhibition includes five large new paintings on canvas and a monumentally-scaled work on paper. A Hydromelodic Event is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Known for her intricate large-scale drawings, Amy Myers creates elaborate images replete with visual allusions to various fields of scientific inquiry including theoretical physics, ontology, neuroscience and anatomy. As the daughter of a physicist and an aviator, Myers was raised in an environment suffused with scientific theory. Coexisting with the ratiocinative elements of Myers' images are ethereal and meditative qualities and a pervasive femininity. Employing concepts from theoretical physics as a "springboard into the 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.”

Though Myers’ primary conceptual starting point is theoretical physics, she modulates between a range of scientific frameworks in her approach. Echoing the fact that all matter is composed of mostly empty space, Myers’ compositions evoke motion, fluidity and a startling sense of void. Looping, recumbent trajectories suggest the paths of quantum particles with form derived from motion. Myers’ immersion in particle physics since childhood has yielded a highly singular approach to rendering matter, wherein form is fundamentally considered as a consequence of subatomic motion, collisions, particulate interplay and energy transfers. As the artist notes,

"The perspective of particle physics is one of a universe without stuff. All particles exist with the potential to combine with and become different particles. They are intermediate states in a network of interactions and are based upon events, not things."

While Myers’ approach to depicting mass and form is 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.

In Myers’ hands, such ideas yield forms that are suffused with the contingent or indeterminate. Though rooted in quantitative theory, the notion that the universe’s constituents are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere leads towards the stubbornly nonempirical realm of the metaphysical. Such ethereal domains are referenced in Myers’ paintings with visual allusions to totemic symbology. Also frequently embedded within Myers’ works are anatomic-seeming forms. Though these forms have an innately feminine character, they remain more referential than literal.