NEW DIRECTION: VIDEO ARTISTS EXPLORE SOUTHERN IDENTITY 
October 24 2009 - February 21 2010

This juried exhibition brings together the work of six artists who are recent graduates from universities and colleges in Tennessee and surrounding states. Their work investigates topics ranging from consumer culture to the process of becoming an adult. They use varied approaches to making video art, including animation, performance-art, narrative, new-narrative, and other experimental techniques. Their range of approaches describes where video art is today and where it is headed in the future.

DWAYNE BUTCHER 
In It’s Got a Hemi, Dwayne Butcher uses a split or double screen to reflect on race and identity in the South. A white and a black male stand in two separate frames dressing and undressing to the sound of a single narrative voice. Told through the voice of the white male, the speaker repeatedly comments on how stereotypes define character. He eventually deems himself “unclassifiable,” due to all of his conflicts of interest. Through the juxtaposition of black and white identity, monologue and silence, and repetitive action, the artist comments on the impact of social and cultural stereotypes on personal identity. 

Dwayne Butcher recently completed his MFA in Studio Arts/Video Arts at Memphis College of Art, where he has also worked as an instructor. In 2008, he received a Hohenberg Traveling Fellowship from Memphis College of Art. Butcher has been exhibiting his work for almost ten years. He is currently the managing editor for the arts magazine Number, INC. His work is represented by the David Lusk Gallery in Memphis, and can be viewed at dwaynebutcher.com. 

BRIENA HARMENING
In this series of short videos, Briena Harmening creates an alter ego named Ilene who allows the artist to explore autobiography and Southern stereotypes. Drawing on performance art, Harmening uses the alter ego device to investigate identities. In three different scenarios, the character of Ilene becomes a storyteller who reflects on the conflict between her personal beliefs and those of her culture. Ilene is a product of the artist’s own family history and relationships and at the same time she has her own individuality; she is caught up in Southern stereotypes but asserts her own personality through humor. By letting Ilene voice her opinions on personal relationships, Harmening is able to address difficult issues in Southern identity in her work. 

Briena Harmening will be completing her MFA from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in May 2010. She received her BFA from Florida Gulf Coast University. At the University of Tennessee she has worked as a Graduate Assistant teaching drawing and painting. In Knoxville, she has also worked as Assistant Director of Gallery 1010.

CHRIS LEFEVRE
Chris LeFevre creates videos that are playful and derive from what he calls a “child-like imagination.” In Play WithYour Food he uses food items and stop animation technique to create a narrative that bridges the gap between innocence and culpability. According to the artist, “these narratives are a lighthearted childish approach to issues which can be thought of as adult in nature,” tinged with a sense of dark humor. Using food as a means of communicating stories, LeFevre gives maturity and visual punch to what might otherwise seem like toddler fodder.

Chris LeFevre recently graduated with a BFA from the University of Mississippi in Oxford where he studied video, photography, and drawing. He has exhibited his work in Jonesboro, Arkansas.

ALEXANDER PAULUS 
In his own words, Alex Paulus makes work that explores “humorous situations that many people encounter…which are usually overlooked and cast aside.” He does this very poignantly with the minimalist piece How do you sell a chicken to a deaf person? Set in a non-descript room, film rolls on a man standing still who silently and repeatedly moves his lips to announce one phrase. Alex uses this comical situation to address the much larger issue of the roots of human belief systems. Through an absurd and repetitive performance, Paulus makes his audience aware of the “insanity” that can drive someone to blindly, or in this case, deafly, follow a specific principle.
As a recent graduate of Memphis College of Art, Alexander Paulus completed his Masters of Fine Arts degree in May 2009. He has taught art at the college as well as high school level. He has exhibited his work at galleries in Memphis and St. Louis, including a recent show at the David Lusk Gallery in Memphis. 

DONNA SMITH
Donna Smith uses video art to “document situations requiring endurance and cosmetic processes” and to closely examine how physical transformation develops. Smith believes this desire for physical change is in an attempt to “overcome something psychological, such as the need to appear perfect or strong.” Throughout the course of her video Spray, the woman’s skin changes in appearance growing darker as intended, while she receives a spray on tan. She is nude from the waist up wearing only a shower cap, intentionally causing “the viewer to feel discomfort by the intimate setting in which the imagery is shown.”
A recent graduate from Rhodes College with a BA, Donna Smith will be receiving her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2011. She has had several exhibitions in and around the Memphis area, and spent a summer in the Sydney Film Studies Program in Australia.

MYRNA TALBOT
The focus of Myrna Talbot’s piece Submission is to explore the conscious and unconscious effects of sexism. In two separate frames, a middle-aged woman dresses simultaneously provocatively and modestly. The background voice is excerpted from an audio interview with the famous French feminist Simone du Beauvoir. The artist uses this combination of audio and video to “question the degrees to which the unconscious places importance on youth, and sexual attractiveness, keeping the female in a cycle of subservience.” Talbot highlights this dilemma by placing an “aging female in a category of weakness and inability.” 

Talbot recently graduated with a BFA from Watkins College of Art and Design with honors and counts many famous local faces as collectors of her work, including Dolly Parton, Earl Scruggs, and Aubrey Haynie. She also plays the mandolin and is currently studying at Georgia State University in Atlanta for her MFA.