TO MAY 31
Though she seems well-adjusted enough in person, Linn Meyers’ art is driven by a crazed obsessivenessone that, fortunately, produces remarkable dividends. Meyers painstakingly draws rows of parallel lines or dots freehand, using ink, acrylic, and colored pencil on Mylarthousands of strokes contained within a single piece. Up close, a viewer can detect the individual marks, but from afar, they resolve themselves into wonderful textural patterns. Her untitled works (one is pictured) suggest the topographical contours of a geologist’s map, verdant farmscapes, or even grainy photographs of the surface of the moon. Most of Meyers’ works hint at three-dimensionality by laying fields of complementary colors underneath a main layer of translucent Mylar; the largest piece in the show makes this illusion material by floating a nearly room-sized piece of fabricmarked with thousands of inked-in hatchesin front of a painted color-spectrum backdrop. Though the piece’s literalism detracts somewhat from the simple suggestiveness of her more modest works, it nonetheless offers a promising cross-fertilization between Eva Hesse-style installations and an op-art sensibility. Meyers aims to explore the divergence between products of man and machine, regular and irregular, perfection and imperfectionbut even without one guiding philosophy, her visuals are fascinating enough to absorb. The show is on view from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday, to Saturday, May 31, at Troyer Gallery, 1710 Connecticut Ave. NW. Free. (202) 328-7189. (Louis Jacobson)