Mitchell-Innes & Nash will present an exhibition of new work by Christopher Miner in its Chelsea gallery from January 15 to February 13, 2009. Miner’s second solo show at the gallery will include a selection of recent videos and a new photograph.

Christopher Miner’s videos blend autobiography, fiction, and documentary elements to make up a world of the heightened ordinary, or the performed self. Barriers between truth and fiction are blurred as Miner catalogues his life as both an insider and outsider in his hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. Sex and marriage, family and religion, racism and politics are recurring themes treated alternately as drama and farce.

The title video, Easter for the Birds, takes a loose and lyrical view of the divisive issues of religious fundamentalism and conservative politics as they unfold in family life. The notion of “family values” is reinvested with meaning, as personal relationships seem to complicate the link between lifestyle and faith.

In other new work, Miner presents a series of interviews with local community members in Jackson who infuse the tradition of storytelling with a peculiar southern connection between the secular and sacred. Miner treats his subjects with empathy, giving his videos an impartiality that belies the controversial subject matter. Other short videos invoke the symbolic imagery of the temporal life on earth: a deformed lamb, a faded photograph, and a man suspended in space in perpetual, lifeless prayer.