Greely Myatt - David Lusk Gallery and Various Other Memphis Locations

by Carol Knowles

(note: an edited version of this review appears in the December 2009 ARTnews.  This is the full copy courtesy of Ms. Knowles.)

Greely Myatt, a Mississippi-born, post-modern sculptor and University of Memphis professor makes art out of cast-off materials that he laces together with sly humor and down-home wisdom. In one of his signature installations, “A Brief History of Sculpture,” real soap bubbles spill over the top and down the sides of a worn wooden plinth as Myatt spoofs his own title, takes sculpture off its pedestal, and suggests that art, rather than being concise or categorical, is effervescent and ever-changing.


In September nine exhibitions, collectively titled “Greely Myatt: and Exactly Twenty Years,” featured Myatt’s most memorable works in venues as varied as Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, The Art Museum of the University of Memphis, Memphis City Hall, P & H Café, and David Lusk, the gallery that gives Memphians a good dose of Myatt’s wit and wisdom every couple of years. 

The partially-opened zipper embedded in an otherwise pristine-white wall at David Lusk suggested a still deeper glimpse into the structure of art which Myatt achieved with a body of recent work that included four large Southern-style quilts made out of salvaged street signs, two installations carved from wood and loaded with innuendo, and twelve lighted marquees constructed out of reclaimed plastic, wood and metal.

Unlike Jenny Holzer’s sardonic takes on “truisms” spotlighted with pulsing LED’s, Myatt’s marquees embodied the wonder and curiosity of a child at play. Catch-phrases that had also served as titles of previous shows -- “Not in This House,” “Not Sold in Stores,” “A Fool w/ an Idea or Two” – were softly backlit by florescent bulbs and spelled with letters that came in every size, shape, degree of transparency and color of the rainbow.

Part child, part son-of-the-South, part Buddha -- Myatt is drawn to paradoxes that challenge and enlarge our perceptions. “Like a Lighthouse,” a beam of hardwood carved into a body-less and freestanding pair of trousers, mounted at the center of a large table, struck this viewer as a wry, viscerally compelling sexual icon that also served as poignant metaphor for the emptiness and isolation we sometimes feel in spite of the constant stimuli in our wired-up, plugged-in and cyber-spaced world.