By way of comparison, the South Carolina State Fair Art Show does make the distinction between professional and amateur, but it is one based solely on the artist's self-definition. Though the State Museum has given legitimacy to self-taught artists in two prominent shows, this exhibit takes the next logical step. It's the cotton pickin', superstitious, Jesus haunted South, and it's the South of Jonathan Green's dressed up Congregation. It's the famous black and white South of the New Deal documentary and the world of color in the painted roadside motels of Eldridge Bagley's South. The exhibit is also about the South that endures, one not tied to fad or fashion, but one that runs home to mama.
Many images evoke the transformative rituals and reassuring habits of family and religion.
It explores what historian Fernand Braudel would describe as the world of material life, one that slowly changes like the waves on the bottom of the ocean as opposed to the faster and more transient waves on the ocean's surface. The exhibition goes back and forth between what's real and what's imagined such as in the tragedy evoked in Keith Carter's Lost Chicken and in the promise of Jonathan Green's painting Daughters of the South. What draws these images into Norrell's construction of the South is their explicit religiosity. The most powerful images of Myth, Memory and Imagination concern death, dying, and faith, and the personal imprint and inventiveness that southerners have brought to the passing of their loved ones. The Home Funeral depicts the crowded household of a poor white southern family, one that seems fatalistically at ease with the body of the deceased.