Myth / Matter brings together Charleston artists Richard Hagerty and Tim Hussey in a focused examination of how meaning is formed—whether through inherited symbolic systems or through sustained engagement with the physical world. Hagerty’s Egyptian-influenced watercolors and paintings draw from surrealist and mythological traditions, where architecture, landscape, and figure function as carriers of memory rather than representations of place, treating myth as a structure through which experience is organized, preserved, and transmitted.

Hussey’s abstract oils approach meaning from the opposite direction: built through layering, erasure, and physical engagement with the surface, his paintings record time, attention, and resistance, replacing narrative with presence and image with material fact. Together, their work suggests that meaning is neither fixed nor given, but produced in the tension between what is remembered and what is felt—between the stories we inherit and the weight of what remains.