Archive Project 24: Amy Myers

Catalogue Essay | Images from the Exhibition Amy Myers Home Page | Fall 2004 Archive

The Project Series
Project 24: Amy Myers

“Fearful Symmetries” – Amy Myers’s Epic Paradigms
by Robert A. Sobieszek

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 terribilitas. 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.

Myers’s figures appear as nothing less than epic machines or cosmic engines measureless in size and incomprehensible in scale. Leeuwenhock or Hubble? Submicroscopic or galactic? Neutron particles or neutron stars? Infinitesimally small and rhapsodic or macroscopically huge and operatic? Vibrational harmonies of superstring theories or a Pythagorean music of the spheres? Is The Opera Inside the Atom (the title of one drawing) conducted in B-flat just like the basal tone emanating from supermassive black holes in space; and what exactly is the libretto? While they suggest much and generate many questions, the drawings and their often playful titles offer no concrete answers.

Still, the figures defy easy dismissal. Despite complete unfamiliarity and all their alien characteristics, they command attention and, once attended to, delight and surprise with their vertiginous shifts of perspective and scale, transparency and opacity, fluidity and stasis. These incommensurable visions are frightful in their overall glory and their iconic insistence. Another drawing’s title, Fearful Symmetry, is decidedly more than appropriate and telling. Echoes from the high poet of Romanticism, William Blake, might be considered relevant throughout. Where – in exactly what “distant deeps or skies” – are these figures located? And who – exactly what “immortal hand or eye” – may suggest what they signify?

Drawing illustrates; and it expresses what cannot be verbalized. Drawing focuses; it isolates; it chooses what is of value. As such it always narrates a moral imperative. It is an “incisive medium for separating clear from confused, worthwhile from worthless phenomena,” according to theorist Barbara Stafford, who also characterizes straight and curved lines as possessing the “normative imperative of statistics.” In short, since aesthetics is inseparable from knowledge, drawing facilitates a certain regimentation of cognition. And through drawing Amy Myers formulates a silent language of seeing and description unshackled by the encumbrances of language, either-or logic, and Newtonian physics – a strictly regimented, highly imaginative visual language of a new science.

Drawings delineate, articulate, and substantiate the understanding of things visual, either seen or imagined. They certainly are able to transcend language; they can even render, at times, the fundamental certainties of mathematics mute and, if not unnecessary, at least redundant. In Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, set alternately in pre-Victorian and contemporary England, the character of Thomasina, a highly precocious teenage girl, conceives of chaos theory a century or so before it is actually invented. Utterly dismissed by her tutor as indulging in fiction rather than science, her work is in turn completely validated from today’s perspective when the modern character Valentine exclaims, “She didn’t have the maths, not remotely. She saw what things meant, way ahead, like seeing a picture.” Similarly, Amy Myers leap-frogs the mathematical details of current theory and envisions images that for her substantiate the meaning of what they represent. These images, in turn, are then not-so-simply narrated by her as pictures.

Picturing things and what they mean has always been the mandate of drawing. Well before language and mathematics, the ancients drew what things meant to them on the interior walls of their caves. Well before fractal geometries were even imagined, Leonardo da Vinci rendered cataclysmic tsunamis inundating landscapes with both microscopic complexity and macroscopic monumentality. Well in anticipation of advanced meteorological models, John Constable conflated the rigors of scientific observation and the expressive sensations of art in delineating unstable atmospheric phenomena. And well before relativity and quantum mechanics were fully assimilated within our social consciousness, M. C. Escher delighted in illustrating the logical worlds of non-Euclidean geometries and improbable dimensions.

In her utterly remarkable drawings Amy Myers delights in depicting unimaginable spaces and improbable systems as well. The things she pictures do not exist in any material sense, in three dimensions and time, or outside of theory. While based on close readings of fact and theory, the drawings are, for the most part, fabrications, imaginings, fictions of science. They are the perceived realities of a new physics with roots extending back to Thomasina’s time, a physics that currently considers general relativity and quantum mechanics as mere details of its foundations. For the past six years, Myers has visually explored some of the most progressive formulations of contemporary cosmology, and has produced immaculate renderings of systems and events that until now have only been described by those “maths” of the highest order.

Born and raised in Texas, Myers studied art and received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois. Her family life was instrumental in contributing to her passion for the sciences. Her father is a physicist, her childhood recollections are dominated by images of molecular models, and her early memories concern “experimentation” and the “notion that everything is a combination of something else.” And as in science, so in art. Artists from Leonardo on have understood that the creative imagination is composed heavily of “fantasia,” a Renaissance term suggesting an “ability to recombine images or parts of images into wholly new compounds or ideas.”

Continually inspired by contemporary physics, Myers recombines and reorders its formulations, descriptions, proofs, and rhetoric. But that is just the beginning:

I start out with certain narratives, zones of characters, functions, and locations. The characters find function and relate to one another. Then you need an environment. The images are created through narratives and symbols. I don’t preconceive the finished image because the image is only the evidence of complex interactions of systems.

And like science building on and modifying prior experiments, Myers finds that her drawings are frequently serial, one drawing suggesting another, a set of systems predicating a slightly different set, an unresolved detail yielding a beginning of another, and so forth – fantasia at its best.

Combined and integrated systems, “areas of activity” as she calls them, are fundamental to her constructed fabrications. Thirty-three distinct systems, for instance, appear in Heliocentropy, most of them in the radiating arms that emanate from a spot deep above the center of the drawing. In 1597 Johannes Kepler published his Mysterium cosmographicum, arguing that Copernicus’s heliocentric universe demanded a fluid cosmos filled with moving bodies in infinite space. Incapable of visualizing how this might appear, Kepler had the solar system engraved as five planets reduced to fixed, Platonic solids, stuffed into individual spheres. Myers’s heliocentric cosmos is the exact opposite: vastly expansive and in flux, fluid to the point of indeterminacy, and infinite to the point of transcendence. Instead of an old, static, and mechanical universe, she proposes a new vision of fluid, dynamic openness. Visual seeing and, thus, thinking outside the spheres, as it were.

There are Platonic forms, and then there are Dyson spheres, ringworlds, hyperal planes, and the macrocosmos. Myers’s universe (or might we say multiverses) is (or are) comprised of incredibly esoteric things for the most part: four elemental forces, black holes and event horizons, branes and Calabri-Yau spaces, extended-dimension objects and curled-up dimensions, wormholes and Quantum tunneling, supergravity and supersymmetry. Einstein’s comforting three dimensions of space with an added component of time have given way to M-theory and 11 “space-time” dimensions. In conversation, phrases like “orbifold and torus,” “heterotic string series,” “anatomy of cosmogony,” and “totality is a point,” flow effortlessly off the artist’s tongue. This, then, is the nature that Myers is depicting, one filled with elegant and mysterious objects that are truly unconventional and unrecognizable: “I believe that these objects do exist,” she affirms, “but they are unfamiliar to us.”

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. Myers’s subjects may consist of imagined worlds, invented constructs, and fabricated artifacts; but her drawings of them are like the finest scientific drawings – “information-rich” and so attentive to details in their execution that the artist seems to vanish into the “evolutionary triumph” of the things themselves.

After all the math and science, however, after all the “information,” there is a decidedly romantic streak in Myers’s art. William Blake, a favorite of the artist, witnessed otherworldly conversations, conducted in “Visionary forms dramatic,” “Creating Space, Creating Time according to the wonders Divine / Of Human Imagination.” Such conversations are, to be sure, not entirely dissimilar from how the new physics creates what Tom Stoppard called the “freaky stuff” of modern science, stuff that is “turning out to be the mathematics of the natural world.” And certainly this is not unlike what Amy Myers has achieved by depicting all the unconventional and “freaky” stuff of contemporary physics – exquisitely rendered fictions of time and space, marvelous fables of the new physics, the best visual story-telling of visionary forms dramatic.

--Robert A. Sobieszek
© copyright 2004, Los Angeles



Robert A. Sobieszek is head curator of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He holds graduate degrees in art history from Columbia University and Stanford University. For over three decades, he has lectured and published widely on the art and history of photography. Sobieszek has organized over 50 exhibitions, including LACMA's “Robert Smithson: Photo Works” and “The Camera I: Photographic Self-Portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection.” His most recent project was “Ghost in the Shell—Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000.” He is currently working on an extended project whose working title is “Alterities: Speculative Fiction and the Visual Arts, 1945-2000.”