A wall-mounted, scarlet lightbox, reminiscent of the signage of off-licences, fish and chip shops and takeaway restaurants of the artist’s hometown, juts out of the gallery wall, setting a stage of sorts. Its branded panels have been removed and replaced with transparent ones through which used towels can be seen, slumped and squashed into a pile inside, shaped like a soft-serve ice cream or perhaps a turd. Two giant ants scale its folds. The towel motif has appeared previously in Myatt’s work, a liminal item, dirty yet used to clean and dry; dropped from waist to floor at the start of an erotic encounter or in accidental exposure; laid on beds before sex and on beaches against sand. Personal yet also communal, hotel towels used by thousands are in a constant state of regeneration: soiled, washed and presented as clean once more. Myatt recalls nostalgically the towels abandoned on his messy bedroom floor to be collected by his mother for laundry.

The language of nostalgia continues in Bloody Gannets (2024), perspex shelves lined with various carbonised pieces of food of the ‘picky bits’ or ‘beige food’ variety: curly fries, crinkle cut chips, filo pastry prawns, fish fingers, chicken nuggets. These foods felt reminiscent to Myatt of what his mother would serve her children after school, as well as the items put in the oven in the early hours after a night out and then forgotten about. In their charred state, the small treats become amorphous black remains and could be mistaken for ancient artefacts or animal waste. Abjection – and its proximity to humour –  is central to Myatt’s practice, in which images of sex, violence, decay and mundanity are compounded by irreverent, banana-peel humour to explore the fine lines between desire and revulsion, innocence and perversion, humour and absurdity. A lexicon of cartoonishly rendered motifs swirls and overlaps in two paintings and two works on paper. A squatting figure appears to defecate. A nude is surmounted by an outsized winged insect and a plated English breakfast. A bulbous rooster mounts a hen in an upper corner. In Twilight
Alley (2024), three thick black lines delineate the corner of a room or a stage with a painted background simulating infinity beyond its flatness. Traditional cel animation involves objects and characters being hand-drawn on clear celluloid sheets and placed over painted backgrounds, and Myatt’s sketchy offerings seem to similarly hover, unmoored and disproportioned, over washes of colour that are cartoonishly bright and call to mind the hues of the bodily: piss yellow, blood red, rotting green, bruised purple.

Myatt is interested in the cartoon realm as one of suspended morality, in which extreme violence and hunter-prey power dynamics are hyperbolised into slapstick entertainment for children and, crucially, freed from consequence. The exhibition takes its title from the 1966 Looney Tunes short Shot and
Bothered, in which Wile E. Coyote notably falls off a cliff, gets hit by a truck, and blows himself up with dynamite in his relentless quest to catch Road Runner. Each time, the coyote bounces back unscathed, already hatching his next ill-fated plan as stars spin around his head. This Sysyphean absurdisty takes sculptural form in Grandad’s
Microwave (2024), an installation of Myatt’s great-grandfather’s microwave suspended from a rope and pulley system. It balances precariously, supported notably by a single ant, legs outstretched to support the appliance it is ludicrously dwarfed by. The shadow of the microwave falls on the ant as it strains against its own demise. Throughout the show, Myatt identifies cycles of transformation and regeneration – dead to vital, dirty to clean, frozen to charred, charming to obscene, funny to tragic, moral to immoral – and highlights the fine line that exists between them, the persistence, banality and, at times, absurdity of our mores, and how these are ultimately subjects to a constant interplay of pleasure, pain, fantasy and fallibility.

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