The Handheld Universe
Vielmetter Los Angeles
Nov 18 2023 – Jan 20 2024
1700 S Santa Fe Ave #101, Los Angeles, CA 90021
“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.”
Amy Myers 1999
Symmetry can be beautiful; it can also be frightening, which may be just a delirious aspect of the sublime. What symmetry can never be, though, is picturesque and quaint; it always commands a certain scale and a certain tembilitas. In a series of large graphite, ink, and gouache drawings on paper, artist Amy Myers portrays nearly symmetrical figures of inordinate force and complexity. The figures are unrecognizable as anything even remotely known, their overall abstract shapes punctuated by teasingly innumerable details, and their rough bilateral symmetries made even more dramatic by being posted slightly off-center. Nothing, from the largest gestalt to the smallest detail, yields any sense of their nature. They are, in short, fantastically alien and sublime at the same time.
The arcane and unfamiliar worlds of science are so convincingly charted by Myers that her work might as well be considered a visual art of both the new physics and science fiction. “Even though my process is grounded in science,” she admits, “it is still a serendipitous kind of adventure.” An adventure, indeed. The scientific concepts and things on which Myers bases her work do not materially exist; they are conceived by theoretical refinements and definable only by certain “maths.” Yet that does not mean they cannot be envisioned and pictured; Leonardo, after all, never saw an actual tidal wave.
Robert A. Sobieszek
ca. 2004, Los Angeles
Read full essay (Pomona catalog)
