Jason Haam is pleased to present linn meyers: Rings of Saturn, the first solo exhibition of linn meyers with the gallery in Seoul, South Korea. Referencing W. G. Sebald’s book of the same name, the title of the exhibition acts as a form of mimesis through correspondence between the visual image within meyers’ physical work and the fragmented narrative within Sebald’s distinctive prose.
For linn meyers, process begins before the act of mark-making. The artist’s physical movement towards the work itself becomes a part of process—similar to the moment of distinction between walking towards the walk and the walk itself. It is in this way that the origin of her works is contextualized not only through the manifestation of the visual image, but also through the immateriality of movement.
The sense of a diverted movement that is nonetheless a movement forward, a movement alongside yet oblique path toward an end, is divided, and more than once. There is the sense of the pilgrimage as devotional journey to a sacred destination and then the sense of pilgrimage as an event of endless wandering, an itinerancy without any clear path toward outcome
-Lecia Rosenthal, “On the Late Sublime: W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn”
While visual forms may end at the periphery of meyers’ works, manifestations of process, as a form of movement, continue beyond the work itself—emerging as a record of her pilgrimage. For meyers, a state of finality is negated through its paradox—a memory of movement within the spatial limitations of the physical work.
The entropic yet methodical image of meyers’ works, exists within a state of visual equilibrium, maintained through a state of perpetual movement. Its resolution is dependent upon a sense of perspective. Meyers’ process is defined by intuitive gestures, in which the visual image emerges from a progressive digression of movement—directed by a sense of ‘nonobjective wandering.’ Simultaneously, meyers’ visual image is defined by a sequential organization, in which process emerges from regressive patterns of movement—delineated from a sense of ‘nonobjective wandering.’ Herein lies the paradox of movement within the visual image—the awareness of a systematic order within an experience of chaotic destabilization.
Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression
-Michel Foucault, “The Order of Things”
Hence, the paradox of movement can exist only in reference to the grid—the context in which one and one other exists only in reference to themselves. Movement, without regard to a sense of destination or finality, emerges as a state of contingency—the absence of necessity; the fact of being so without having to be so.
A state of finality can thus only be achieved through the visual image of the work itself. Process becomes a means of documenting the physical movement of the body. In this way meyers’ exploration becomes displaced by the visual image of her works. The resulting image emphasizes the distinction between her body as a construct of process and creator of movement and the work as an embodiment of process and a document of past movement. Herein lies the paradox that exists throughout meyers’ works—the visual image is contextualized in reference to the body as movement, yet the works themselves manifest a state of finality.
And thus, the resulting state of contingency within meyers’ works—in which both movement and finality exist within an oscillating state of uncertainty—becomes a paradox in and of itself.
