The Memphis art scene expands this month with the opening of the Hannah Davis Gallery on Huling Row Downtown.

Davis, 31, was born and raised in Arkansas, and arrived in Memphis in 2006 on what she calls an "extended hurrication" from post-Katrina New Orleans.

"I lived in Bayou St. John, and my neighborhood was slow to come back. A year-and-a-half after the hurricane, I realized I needed to get away and breathe," Davis says. She bought a house in Midtown, but still returns to New Orleans once a month.

Her go-between status will bring a taste of the Big Easy to the Bluff City's art offerings. The Hannah Davis Gallery opens tonight with "The Rhythm of Life," an exhibition by New Orleans-based photographer Andy Levin.

Thirty black-and-white works by Levin, a former Life Magazine contributor, inaugurate the space, which occupies a former interior design showroom on Huling, between South Main and Front.

Some of the images, including an astonishing landscape of flooded New Orleans with a plume of smoke rising beyond the horizon, are what Davis describes as Levin's post-Katrina "gloom and doom" pieces.

Others, such as "Trinidad Mas," a shot of jubilant, futuristic dancers, and "India Bathers," shot during a religious festival at Bombay's Juhu Beach, teem with positive emotion.

A giclée print, "Negril Bass," juxtaposes a choppy seascape with the curves of a well-worn stand-up bass. A giclée is a fine art print from a digital source using ink-jet printing.

"We'll have four groupings of Andy's work," says Davis, who describes the photographer -- whom she met at New Orleans' Jazz Fest -- as a "very eccentric, very wise soul."

Another 18 works by two Arkansas-based artists, painter Katherine Strause and assemblage artist Anita Davis, complete the show.

Strause's work derives from found photographs, depicting realistic portraits of familiar, yet anonymous Southern figures -- à la George Rodrigue's Cajun scenes -- in oil.

"Album" features women of varying generations -- possibly aunt, grandmother, mother and daughter, with a new baby on her lap. The portrait could have been made from an outdoor snapshot ripped from a family's photo collection, save the stylized details of a train engine and a photo album cover that float overhead.

In "Muscatine," Strause renders a few women, possibly the same group, captured at a younger age, flirtatiously hoisting skirts and pointing penny loafers to show off coltish legs.

Twelve of Anita Davis' tongue-in-cheek assemblages, including "Funky Chicken" and "Cosmic Pomp," round out the show. The artist, who is the gallery owner's mother, uses found objects -- clocks, trophy cups, shells, jewelry, plastic toys -- to make pieces reminiscent of the folk art created by Kosciusko, Miss., resident L.V. Hull.

"My heart is still down in New Orleans," says Hannah Davis, who plans to serve red beans and rice at the opening tonight.

"I don't want to deter any other fabulous artists, but my real goal is to bring more Gulf Coast artists north," she says.

"They've gone through so much, and they're still having a hard time. I know they've put a lot of soul into their work, and I'd love to show it for them in Memphis."

"The Rhythm of Life"

An exhibition of photographs by Andy Levin, with additional work by Anita Davis and Katherine Strause.

Friday, June 25, 6-9 p.m.

At the Hannah Davis Gallery, 408 S. Front Street, Suite 105.