The Rosemary Berkel and Harry L. Crisp II Museum and Department of Art will host the exhibit "Tell Me TV" in the Rosemary Berkel and Harry L. Crisp II Museum at Southeast Missouri State University's River Campus.

"Tell Me TV, Elevating Television to its Rightful Place as our Narrative Art Form" will open April 30.

The public is invited to attend the opening from 4-6 p.m. April 30 with a gallery talk by the artist at 3 p.m. The exhibit will remain on display through May 14.

Rosemary Berkel and Harry L. Crisp II Museum at Southeast Missouri State University is pleased to present "Tell Me TV, Elevating Television to its Rightful Place as our Narrative Art Form," an interactive video piece by Brooklyn based conceptual artist Elizabeth Demaray, opening April 30. This installation features Southeast students and members of the community telling the story of any television program that they ever remember watching.

Those who would like to participate by telling a story for "Tell Me TV" can e-mail elizdemaray@mindspring.com or visit www.elizabethdemaray.com with the name and episode of the show they would like to recount. Videotaping will take place on the Southeast campus the week of April 27.

Often hilarious and always touching, these video shorts mine the gap between the real and the remembered while highlighting everything from the story of a suspenseful animal show, to a Battlestar Galactica episode, to one evening's broadcast of the Philadelphia local news.

The amazing thing about American culture is the pervasiveness of television and the stories we, by extension, share. Besides the United States, there are few places in the world where an immigrant family, in one generation, can lose its since of cultural identity," Demaray said. "In place of this will be television shows, fashion and the desire for advertised products.

According to Demaray, this modern era of collective stories is currently coming to an end. With the advent of cable television, the Internet, interactive gaming and the loss of television via a national analogue signal, people as a culture are now consuming many different types of entertainment.

Demaray is a conceptual artist who uses her background in cognitive psychology and neuroscience to create artwork that highlights the kind of incongruities and unexpected connections one finds between the named world and the real. 

"My interest in both science and art making has been the relationship between perception and non-logical thought," Demaray said. "As an artist, I create work that is not rationally based, but may instead be understood in the light of basic psychological needs, such as care, control, taxonomy and love." She is the recipient of the National Studio Award at the New York Museum of Modern Art / P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, The Emerging Artist Award at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art and the New York Foundation for the Arts 2005 NYFA Fellowship in Sculpture. She is currently head of the sculpture concentration at Rutgers University-Camden.

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