Greely Myatt

To mark Greely Myatt’s twentieth year working and teaching in Memphis, his work is featured in nine venues around the city for nearly four months. This proliferation of exhibitions offers a vast retrospective view of his output, much of which suggests or actively engages in dialogues––between the artist and art history, the art and its imagined audience, or notions of fine art and the craft tradition.

One motif that appears repeatedly in Myatt’s work is the cartoon speech bubble. He fashions these from found pieces of wood, scraps of metal from discarded signage, old cookie and baking tins, and even false eyelashes. In Talking, 2006–2009, an installation that was on view at Rhodes College’s Clough-Hanson Gallery, eleven speech bubbles hung on a single wall, containing fragments of brand names, embossed architectural decorations, or a zipper or ruler embedded in their surfaces. The speech bubble appears again at the Memphis Brooks Museum in I gotta learn to talk, 2006. Here, instead of recouped materials mounted on wood, Myatt has meticulously assembled 156 paper rectangles, each containing a comic strip, their surfaces whitewashed save for a single statement in a bubble. Each seems to represent dramatic introspection by the artist––NOBODY APPRECIATES THE WORK I DO or MY NAME WILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY––if not gentle mockery of art criticism or a reaction from a blasé audience––DO YOU HAVE ANY OTHER IDEAS? or WE DON’T GET IT EITHER.

Myatt’s role as a southern artist facing the canonical works of art history is never far from his mind, as works including Roomrug, 1999, demonstrate. The combination of multicolored broomsticks fashioned into a fragment of a rug and reflected into a right-angled mirror re-creates a Smithsonesque non-site, though the site represented is that of the domestic sphere. The playful attitude and meticulous rigor with which Myatt handles his materials might be considered a mask that hides a deeper understanding of the roles and restrictions of regional artists in a universal context.

This exhibition is also on view at the Art Museum at the University of Memphis until November 7 and the Dixon Gallery and Gardens through November 14. It was recently at the Clough-Hansen Gallery at Rhodes College, the Metal Museum, Power House Memphis, David Lusk Gallery, P & H Center for the Arts, and the On the Street Gallery at the Memphis College of Art.