A Visual Artist Creates Lyrical, Linear Poetry

Linn Meyers, “Our View from Here” (detail) (2016) drawing, (all photos of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, by Cathy Carver)

About a Line

There is something about a line that is eternal,

not

because we wish it so, but rather because

in separating the light from the dark, we make

a passage through

all the sundry reasons to lie still and

accept what you have been given.

(isn’t legacy disappointing?)

Something about a line that is progressive, denoting

the difference between here and

there, and marking that difference in length, in the breath

held between instances of flight,

Linn Meyers “Our View from Here” (detail) (2016)

Walking these museum halls that curve in on themselves

and are now

marked with plummeting and escalating chronicles

of what the line has survived

to tell.

Is it the undulant grain of its massed form that makes

It so

confidently optimistic:

the knowing it will rise again;

or is it the togetherness?

One line joins hands with another and soon there is a

fire along the horizon,

a swooping and soaring conflagration

that is a stay against darkness.

Linn Meyers “Our View from Here” (detail) (2016)

Why did we leave the caves?

To make edges, perimeters, and further out,

frontiers?

To make ourselves

test the more profound

question of our continuation

through the formalized sorties against space —

cold,

unbroken, unwelcoming space.

We started making lines and broke that raw space, giving ourselves an out.

Follow it even in its relentless hopefulness.

Where are you going, you ask.

No. Be quiet.

Hold the line.

Linn Meyers Our View From Here will be on display at the Hirshhorn Museum (700 Independence Avenue SW, Washington, DC) through May 14, 2017