July 6 - July 27, 2007

Closing Reception: Friday, July 27, 2007, 6 - 9p.m.

Scattered Mythologies covers three years of Mysock’s paintings, completed between 2004 and 2007.

In Scattered Mythologies, Mysock’s work follows themes of semantics, story telling, and oral history. His paintings develop these themes to explore the ways in which language has the power to transform and create context. Mysock is also passionately invested in the preservation of America’s folklore and unique oral tradition. Galvanized by the news that his mother’s elementary school students had never heard of John Henry, the steel-driving man, Mysock painted a series of reinterpretations of this legendary figure, reflecting John Henry’s shifting identity as passed down through stories and songs.

But Mysock is no mere sentimentalist: in the series Eight Reasons for Eight Hours and The Fore Food Groups, Mysock wittily reassembles American truisms that have taken on questionably eternal qualities. In these series, the mythic qualities of information about the right quantity of sleep, the categorization of food, and the importance of the founders of our country are exposed with Mysock’s characteristic humor.

Scattered Mythologies covers considerable ground, but the exhibition is thematically unified by Mysock’s concern with situations of written and spoken language. Whether manifested through the speech in soap operas in Soap Operations or on road signs as in I Miss You, Too, language is Mysock’s starting point.