About the Exhibition.

An accomplished artist and writer based in New York, Myers has been committed for years to transforming our understanding of globalization and the multiple realities it creates. Through his work and practice Myers draws our attention to the shortcomings of intellectual disciplines struggling to make sense of our world order and asks us to look beyond the failing metrics we use to quantify the textured dimensions of our networked society. In doing so, Myers brings into focus a richly interwoven set of critical intimacies; quotidian actions through which globalization is embodied, articulated, performed, and made tactic. These moments, worldly in nature but scaled in personhood, are where Myers sites the lived consequences of broader geopolitical, economic, social, and cultural mechanics.

For his exhibition at TMR Guadalajara Myers presents two bodies of work that explore the construction of contested visualities—image landscapes that take shape when multiple languages are forged into shared pictures. The first body of work, titled I Am Not a Human Being, was produced through a collaboration between Myers and a group of Vietnamese embroiders who would sow with him as they occasionally listened to Lil’ Wayne songs. The linguistic complexity of Weezy’s lyrics, masked in the simplicity of his puns, was visualized into images stich by stich—giving way to a codex of signs and symbols grounded in cultural specificity yet fluid enough to provoke varying meanings from viewers who encounter them. The second body of work, Vxllrncgnt, takes the Asafo flags made by the Fante people of Ghana as a point of departure. These flags, which give figurative life to the proverbs or sayings endemic to the Asafos, or social/military clubs, trace their origins back to European colonial rule when Western nations used flags to project their power and domination; composing stories of Empire with colors and icons. Mobilizing the function of these flags as repositories of narratives both real and imaginary, Myers has created two monumental banner works with his collaborators in Egypt. These works, loaded with images that blend the reality of our time with hopeful specters, are flags for nations that are yet to be.

 Distinct in certain ways, these two bodies of work both grapple with a simple human act—our ability to envision or imagine. In Myers’s work, the process of translating language to image; of traveling between the discursive and the pictorial, is like disassembling a palimpsest—showing us how the histories and experiences of those who came before us are inevitably carried on through the actions we enact upon the world. As embroiderers in Saigon make pictures from the words vocalized in Weezy’s “How to Love,” or tapestry makers in Luxor assemble textile parchments into figures, the visions they give us are filled with gentle disturbances—the head of an African-American man outlined off-scale because it was perhaps embroidered by someone whose only seen black bodies in YouTube videos or an orange-toned arm, meant to be brown, stitched onto a tapestry as such because trade agreements make certain dyes difficult to access. These consequential subtleties that Myers shows us are where the global is made real and graspable; where we come to know that even our most basic actions are tied to processes that exist beyond ourselves. The ability to incite this realization is where the agency of Myers’s works is found—where he makes us deeply conscious that what we do as individuals inevitably affects the way that worlds are made.