Richard Chartier

TEMPORARY PLEASURES
Linn Meyers’ new wall drawings unwind in epic proportion in “Here Today,” her latest exhibition on display at the Art Gallery at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Meyers has a meticulous way with lines that results in intricate but naturally flowing patterns. Like her small-scale works, Meyers’ new oversized efforts — including one created with local sound artist Richard Chartier — reveal Meyers’ purposeful process to flattering effect.

The first piece explodes from the center of the front gallery’s concave wall like a Big Bang, with forms resembling wisps of hair unraveling toward its edges. But the real spectacle is the lines themselves. Upon closer inspection one can see the interplay of color and motion in Meyers’ work that gives it its unique, resonant quality.

“We were going to put a disclaimer on the door that said if you suffer from a seizure disorder, do not enter,” says Meyers jokingly.

“Every time I walk into the gallery, I see it differently,” she adds, quizzically noting the drawing’s “different proximities.” That aspect of the final product she admits to marveling at but not to have necessarily intended in undertaking her largest drawing to date.

The second work consists of two smaller canvases that fold together toward a point of no return and take on a sculptural quality. Abuzz with Chartier’s eight-channel digital audio composition, the piece allows for another experience altogether: its reverberations draw you into the ensuing vortex along with Meyers’ spiraling, curvilinear inlay.

Chartier said he wanted the sound to “seep” into Meyers’ work, which it does literally through transducers (instead of speakers), so the art becomes the amplifier. The result is a sublime sense of balance in keeping with Meyers’ organic executions.
(Washington Post Express, US)

–

excerpt from: Artist Goes Flat-Out to Draw the Viewer In and The Story Behind the Work

“When I’m working, I’m inside of it,” says the Washington-based artist, who has works in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and other museums. “That I can bring the viewer to that point is a goal. A lofty goal.”

In that regard, a second drawing is even more successful than the first. Located in the gallery’s back room, the collaborative installation with D.C. sound artist Richard Chartier is a kind of walk-in drawing, a surround-sound environment that pairs Meyers’s vibrating visuals—one on the right, one on the left—with an equally minimalist soundscape featuring Chartier’s trademark digitally rendered “music.”

Chartier’s composition evokes keening whale song one minute, distant crickets the next. A theremin-like sci-fi score threads in and out, punctuated by vaguely recognizable noises. A dropped pen cap? Something rubbing up against something else? Static?

Here, the two walls on which Meyers has drawn come together to form a “V.” Enter it, and after a few steps you’re standing, quite literally, inside it.

… The collaboration between Linn Meyers and Richard Chartier boasts, according to the wall label, eight “audio transducers” applied directly to the back surface of the walls on which Meyers drew her art. Translation: “The entire drawing is a speaker,” Chartier says.

Want to test it? Place your hand on either of the two blank white walls just to the right or left of the entrance, being careful not to touch the drawing itself. Those throbbing bass notes, which you may feel before you hear them, are coming from one of two woofers. Three additional pairs of higher-frequency transducers (or tweeters) are hidden behind the drawing itself.

The alliance between the two artists was almost four years in the making. That’s when Meyers and Chartier, whose sound art was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, first started talking about working together.

This particular A/V partnership began with Chartier’s soundtrack. As it happens, he almost immediately had to revise it, after seeing the first few feet of Meyer’s drawing. Originally trained as a visual artist and designer, he says his composition felt too “dense” for Meyers’s wavy lines of light, grayish wash. Back to the drawing board — or, in this case, Chartier’s computer — to tweak the piece. Fortunately, the software he uses translates sound into visible wave patterns (i.e., he can see it on the screen, as well as hear it).

His solution? “I tried,” he says, “to make it float.”
(The Washington Post, US)