Amy Lin, Infusing Dots With Personality

"Disjointed," from Amy Lin's solo show. (By Amy Lin)

What is most beautiful about the work of Amy Lin, an artist who is having her first solo exhibition on the Alexandria campus of Northern Virginia Community College, is not the work's retinal impact.

Yes, her colored-pencil dot abstractions are lovely, at times evoking strings of Mardi Gras beads that have been strewn randomly on a table, at others more rigorous fractal patterns. It is, however, the pictures' performative aspect -- their nature as documentary records of the repetitive, almost obsessive-compulsive, actions that created them -- that fascinates, and lingers, long after you have left the gallery.

By the artist's reckoning, there are 35,000 hand-drawn dots in the 23 works on view. (I'll take her word for it; I didn't feel like counting.) In the two years she has been pursuing this line of artistic inquiry, Lin estimates she has drawn almost 81,000 dots, which range in size from pea to pinhead dimensions. "I'm nowhere near stopping anytime soon," she writes in her artist's statement.

Like the art of Jacob El Hanani, whose small drawings made from thousands of Rapidograph hash marks can take months to create, or the beaded and stitched abstractions of Karin Birch, there's more to Lin's art than meets the eye. Sure, these pictures could have been produced digitally with a lot less effort -- and from a distance, or in reproduction, they often look as if they were. But it is that very effort that one feels when one stands in their presence. Not effort, really, for effort implies sweat and strain, and Lin's dots dance lightly on the page. "Manufacture" comes close, if you take the word in its original sense, meaning the making of by hand, but that term is also weighed down by the suggestion of machines. Despite their order, there's something organic about Lin's dots.

If I have a quibble with them, it is about the way they are framed, with tight, little mat boards whose narrow borders seem to choke off their air, making it hard for them to breath.

It is no accident that Lin calls her exhibition -- as well as several works in the show -- "Affinity," suggesting both a kind of magnetic attraction between her dots, controlling the way they move, and a similarity between them and us. It is the dots' metaphorical humanity then, their imperfection (or "personality," to use the artist's word), that makes each of them, and the way they were created, special. In a sense, they are stand-ins for people: beautiful because, and not in spite, of their flaws.

AMY LIN: AFFINITY Through June 10. Margaret W. and Joseph L. Fisher Art Gallery, Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall and Arts Center, Northern Virginia Community College, 3001 N. Beauregard St., Alexandria. 703-845-6156.http://www.nvcc.edu/alexandria/schlesingercenter/gallery.html. Open Monday-Friday 10 to 4 and during all events and performances. Free.