LOS ANGELES, CA.- The artworks included here examine our perception of time’s passage, and they question our concepts of scale. linn meyers, Jenene Nagy, and Marc Pally all make labor intensive abstractions. Their practices straddle the line between drawing and painting. The accumulated marks and materials on their surfaces immediately make the time spent making them clear. The human presence and repeated physical motions embedded in the artworks is evident.
Over the hours, days, and weeks spent realizing these pieces, the compositions grow intuitively, expanding and enlarging, yet always with a focused precision. They are devoid of intentional narratives, yet seem encoded with information. They are charting something not fully known or understood, but implied. These cartographic endeavors may not result in legible facts or distinct answers, but a certain shrouded information is still evident, and in the process of experiencing these works there is a way to better understand the world. The idea of the ocean floor here is a metaphor for the inscrutable, paralleling deep internal sensations, where simmering proto-thoughts are forming, but are not always able to be articulated. The time spent on these works allows the artists to mine these depths, to somehow visually record these churning feelings or observations.
Marc Pally’s works remind us of the astounding structural congruities in the universe over logarithmically increasing scales, yet remain resolutely abstract. His improvisational graphite gestures grow without a set course or plan, like coral spreading over the cloudy sea of layered painted surfaces. Colors deep below the surface reveal themselves, further inviting viewers into the strata of these worlds. In a recent catalog essay, Constance Mallinson writes of his marks that “the associations seem endless: finely veined leaves, hairy roots, mycelia, vital organs, helical and molecular chains, drapey vines, amoebas, planaria, cross sections of plant and animal tissue, insects, reptiles, sea creatures, algae, entrails.” They “simultaneously evoke tiny cells and galactic events”. They demonstrate the importance of interconnectedness, nothing and no one being in a vacuum, everything is tied together and interdependent.
Jenene Nagy embraces repetition and devotion in her process, leading to artworks that slow the viewing experience. She asks her audience to fully engage in “the simple act of looking, to acknowledge their place in time as they contemplate an accrual… the artworks are a record of seeking the slightly out of reach, the waiting to be discovered.” Although, as Dan Beachy-Quick noted in Artforum “… her sense of time does not center around an accumulation of hours demarcating life into the fateful tenses of future, present, and past. Nagy’s investigation is an experiment in thinking about the passage of days differently, in which the planet’s turn around the sun doesn’t bring us simply to another year, but takes us back to the point from which we began, returning us to our origin, a place in which creation is ongoing, mythical, and somehow—impossible to explain—eternally nascent.” Where there is always room for renewal, perpetual new possibilities. Her ‘mass’ series are made from strips of paper being treated with graphite paint made by the artist and collaged into horizontal and vertical patterns. Moments of relief where the strips intersect generating subtle patterns. In her ‘Dusk” works Nagy creates a firm and classic grid, but the subtle variations of each daub of paint, filling each square, reveal an unmistakable human touch; “..necessary and revelatory errors that teach us to love this errant world”, as Mr. Beachy-Quick adroitly observed.
linn meyers strikes a visual balance between structure and fluidity to ground a deeper exploration of control and spontaneity, of how we react to and digest events around us “meyers’s paintings point to diagrammatic visual languages outside the traditional scope of fine art such as topographical maps, cosmological charts, or psychological landscapes that seek an order or logic to chaotic phenomenon. And yet… each one a record of the constellations of decisions, mistakes, tensions, and interventions that adhere to each mark… these paintings hold together the monumental and microscopic forces and feelings that creation, labor, and daily experience all share…” -Dr. Jordan Amirkhani. meyer’s works on vintage graph paper featured in this exhibition are made up of thousands of meticulously ordered hand-drawn lines. The gridded forms give a feeling of stability, anchor points that prove subversive as she proceeds to explore the unseen. She revels in the imperfections of her human touch, highlighting the cracks in perfect systems, prying at the seams. Entropy and structure remain balanced in the work, but their give and take is importantly acknowledged. Her works rally against the ever-increasing speed and scale of the world in which we are living, they tenderly ask for closer and more nuanced inspection. Not just of themselves, but everything else too.
These three artists offer a dialogue between the measurable and the immeasurable. They show patterns and forms coalescing into new universes, and subsequently breaking down. A repeated cycle of ideas and feelings exploding into and out of existence.
Marc Pally was represented for 25 years by legendary LA galleries Ulrike Kantor and Rosamund Felson throughout the 1980s and up to 2010. His works are included in the collections of almost every major museum in Southern California: LACMA, MOCA, the HAMMER, the Orange County Museum of Art, UC Santa Barbara, the Weismann at Pepperdine, as well as other intuitions around the country. In addition his work has been on view at a longer list of institutions, including: The Getty Research Institute, LAXART, Redcat, Fisher Museum of Art (USC), Riverside Museum of Art, Guggenheim Gallery and many others. In recent years he has been working in his studio on labor intensive new paintings that are only now being seen. Pally got an MFA from CalArts in the late 70s, and was then an early director of the non-profit Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). After exhibiting for over two decades he focused on curating public art projects, starting around 2005, working with artists such as Todd Gray, Renee Green, Jenny Holzer, Michael McMillen, Nam June Paik, Steve Roden, Jennifer Steinkamp among many others. He had a 2024 solo exhibition at Denenberg Gallery in Los Angeles.
Jenene Nagy lives and works in the Inland Empire region of Southern California. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues in Los Angeles, Portland, New York, and Berlin. Nagy's work is held in several permanent collections including the Portland Art Museum, the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, the University of Wyoming Art Museum, and Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts. Furthermore, her work has been exhibited at a number of additional museums, including a major solo show at the University of Wyoming Museum of Art in 2023. Her work has been recognized with grants and awards from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, the Oregon Arts Commission, Colorado Creative Industries, the Ford Family Foundation and in 2016 a nomination for the United States Artist Fellowship. Nagy is one half of the curatorial team TILT Export:, an independent art initiative with no fixed location, working in partnership with a variety of venues to produce exhibitions. From 2011-12 she was the first Curator-in-Residence for Disjecta Contemporary Art Center in Portland, Oregon. She is represented by PDX CONTEMPORARY ART, Portland, Oregon. and Alfa Gallery, Miami, Florida.
linn meyers’s works have been included in exhibitions and permanent collections at such institutions as Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Kreeger Museum, Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, Hammer Museum, LACMA, Drawing Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Amore Pacific Museum of Art in South Korea, and British Museum in London, among others. meyers’s artistic practice has been recognized with numerous honors, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, several DC Commission on the Arts fellowship awards, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. A graduate of The Cooper Union (BFA) and the California College of the Arts (MFA). She is represented by Jason Hamm Gallery, Seoul. meyers currently divides her time between Washington, DC, and Los Angeles.
