You don’t need to look too far in the sky to see the stars, not at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. That’s where Greely Myatt has installed his Starry, Starry starscape for the museum’s inaugural Winter Art Garden. Consisting of four sculptural elements — Big Star, Star Fall, Star Sprays, and Sirius (Dog Star and Pup) — the starscape, which opened at the end of November, is a constellation of Myatt’s own creation, stemming from the artist’s recent obsession with stars.
It all started with a show last year for Eagle Gallery at Murray State in Kentucky. For each show, as with the Winter Garden, Myatt notes that “space is crucial,” meaning that he curates his pieces to suit the space they’re shown in, often creating pieces if he’s so inspired. And for “tool,” as the show was called, Myatt was inspired by the reflective black floor of Eagle Gallery. “I wanted to do something with neon,” he says.
What exactly, he didn’t know yet. Myatt toyed with the idea of ripples in water, but after playing with a metric folding rule and shaping into a five-point star, he found his subject. “It was a form that wasn’t just erratic. It was fun, and relatively easy to make,” he says. “And so that happened.” And he happened to have an extra five pieces of traffic sign post leftover from another project, so he made a “massive” star and “put neon under it to reflect light and bounce it back up.”
Now that massive star — aptly titled Big Star, with a nod to the Memphis-based band — sits against the Brooks Museum. To the side of it, on the pedestals where statues Spring and Summer once stood, another star is propped up, this one made of charred wood.
“It’s a fragmented star,” Myatt says of Star Fall as it’s called. “When I was making the other stars [for previous shows], I kind of became interested in, instead of the completeness of it, letting the mind mentally finish it. And I kind of like the incompleteness.”
The wood of this fragmented star comes from a pine tree Myatt grew himself, starting in the third grade. “It was kind of a common tradition that teachers would give students, or at least in Mississippi, a sapling that you would plant and nurture if you were a reasonably good student,” he says. “So I did that, and I planted it behind my mom’s house. And 55 years later, my twin sister called me and said, ‘Hey, I cut your tree. Do you want any of it?’ I said, ‘You did what!’ But my sister was nervous about the storms blowing through and the trees coming down. This was about eight years ago.”
Meanwhile, Sirius (Dog Star and Pup), which is suspended between two trees near the plaza, is made of broom handles, and Star Sprays, which spring up from the umbrella holes in the plaza’s tables like bouquets of sparklers, are made of traffic signs. “I like to have all these materials around because I will use them eventually,” Myatt says. “My mom was like that — some people would call us hoarders. I remember as a kid she taught us how to pull old nails out and straighten them because we had plenty of wood, but we didn’t have any nails and we didn’t have any money. It’s always stuck with me, you know, that kind of idea of reusing material and seeing the good in something old.”
All in all, though, as he reflects on the use of stars in his work, Myatt says, “They’re abstract, but they’re real. It’s kind of like Dave Hickey once said, ‘A Pollock doesn’t mean anything, but it has meaning.’”
The installation was made possible through the work of Kristin Pedrozo, Jon Hart, Chris Little, Jennifer Draffen, and more, Myatt adds.
Starry, Starry, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, through January 2025
