JIM BURTON

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

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Jim Burton was born in 1971 in Albany, GA, and was adopted and raised as the son of James R. Burton and Connie Elizabeth Odom Burton in rural Dooly County. He grew up working on the Burton/Ledford Family Farm, being influenced all the while by the myriad cultural stances in the Rural South. He was fascinated by the social interactions and disjunctions he saw happening all around him. It seems natural, then, that these early experiences would foreshadow an artistic career in which he would explore these narratives. To this purpose, he employs personal memories from his Southern upbringing in the form of images, family history, and interpersonal dialog in order to highlight the common interpretations, misconceptions, and constructs of the culture to which he was exposed. While exploiting these images and ideas to his own subversive ends, he also allows them the reverence and the saccharin sentimentality that they both deserve and demand In addition to using paint as his trained medium, Jim also employs sculptural, sound, video, and lighting elements to artificially dramatize his installations A personal mythology emerges in his work that implicates the viewer in the story lines. With the work, the sights and sounds of Jim’s Rural South become living entities, with rich, enigmatic, and sometimes quietly insidious narratives that emerge out of this mishmash of iconic imagery. Jim Burton lives and works in Denton, TX and exhibits nationally and internationally. He received his BFA in Fine Art from Valdosta State University in Valdosta, GA, and his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of North Texas in Denton. Jim is currently serving as Senior Lecturer of Drawing and Painting in the College of Visual Art and Design at UNT. He returns to his childhood home in Vienna as frequently as possible to collect imagery and video,