Exhibitions (Spring 2025)
Begonia Labs
Vanessa Charlot
Between Rivers and Revolutions
On view: March 24, 2025–June 13, 2025
Opening reception: Friday, March 28, 2025 from 6-8pm.
Begonia Labs: 2805 West End Avenue, Nashville, TN.
The river remembers. It carries the weight of stories, the pulse of resistance, and the echoes of those who have fought for liberation. Vanessa Charlot’s lens moves between the waters of the Mississippi Delta, the tides that lap Haiti’s shores, and the currents off Florida’s coast, tracing the spiritual, cultural, and revolutionary ties that bind these landscapes together.
–Grace Aneiza Ali, Curator, Somewhere We Are Human
About the Artist
Vanessa Charlot is an award-winning photographic artist, filmmaker, and Assistant Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Mississippi School of Journalism and New Media. Her work transcends traditional boundaries, blending documentary photography, filmmaking, and interdisciplinary research to explore the complex intersectionality of race, politics, culture, and gender. Charlot’s artistic practice intertwined with the exploration of Black life, compelling viewers to confront and reimagine the often distorted narratives that shape perceptions of Black bodies. Drawing from Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” Charlot uses her art to weave together history, memory, and imagination, disrupting conventional notions of objectivity and neutrality in visual storytelling. Her projects are both intimate and politically resonant, serving as acts of reclamation and reframing that aim to restore and recontextualize the histories and legacies of her subjects. Through her lens, Charlot engages in a form of storytelling that challenges boundaries, giving voice to the untold and overlooked.
Her photographs and films have garnered international acclaim, with works commissioned by The New York Times, Gucci, Vogue, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Oprah Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Apple, New York Magazine, Buzzfeed, Artnet News, and The Washington Post, among others. In November 2022, Charlot’s work graced the cover of The Washington Post’s Photo Issue, further cementing her influence in contemporary visual culture. Charlot’s career spans the U.S., the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia, where she has not only documented diverse experiences but also provided holistic safety training to leading media outlets. Her dedication to the craft and the community was recognized with the International Women’s Media Foundation Courage in Journalism Award in 2021, underscoring her commitment to storytelling that is as courageous as it is compassionate.
Where Are We?
On view January 14, 2025–March 7, 2025
Opening reception scheduled for January 17, 2025 from 6-8pm.
Begonia Labs: 2805 West End Avenue, Nashville, TN.
Where Are We? invites us to reflect on time, place, and the future with curiosity. Featuring IMGRNT (Arash Shoushtari), Alena Mehic, Jerry Bedor Phillips, and Delanyo Mensah—whose roots span Iran, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Palau, and Ghana—the exhibition reassembles memory to reclaim the present and imagine new futures. These artists draw on family narratives, archival images, and personal histories to explore the complexities of migration and belonging.
The title evokes both disorientation and possibility, suggesting a threshold where boundaries blur and curiosity emerges. The question extends beyond physical place, probing the relationship between heritage, time, and transformation. The artists reject static notions of identity, offering layered realities that merge memory with reinvention.
Through worldbuilding, the artists move beyond survival, imagining new spaces for connection. They transform cultural symbols—origami boats, Persian rug motifs, postcards, and intergenerational portraits—honoring maternal figures and ancestral legacies. Their work shows that the immigrant experience is not merely adaptation but the creation of spaces where histories converge and futures are forged.
Where Are We? is guest curated by Sai Clayton as part of the Begonia |Curatorial Lab, a mentorship program fostering dialogue and curatorial exchange in the Global South(s). It is part ofSomewhere We Are Human, the 2024-25 Public Programs and Engagement series of the Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice at Vanderbilt University, supported by the Ford Foundation and Mellon Foundation.
About the Curator
Sai Clayton (she/her) is an artist-curator based in Nashville, TN. Clayton’s work references her Japanese heritage and Southern upbringing, reflecting the absurdity of negotiating two cultures and races. She is interested in representing transcultural paradoxes expressed by the feeling of non-belonging and code switching experienced by immigrants and biracial people. She was previously the 2021-22 Curatorial Fellow at the Frist Art Museum and currently serves as Curatorial Director for COOP Gallery. She holds a B.A. in Visual Arts from Middle Tennessee State University.
About the Artists
Arash Shoushtari, a.k.a. IMGRNT is an Iranian-born, American multi-disciplinary artist, currently based out of Nashville, TN. Shoushtair’s work explores a range of themes all centered within, and inspired by, the immigrant experience. His visual work is often an examination of visual perceptions, optical illusions, and modern takes on patterns that speak to a rich cultural background. As storytelling through patterns are a cornerstone of Persian rugs and textiles that are a big inspiration for his work.
Alena Mehić (b. 1995, Zavidovići, Bosnia & Herzegovina; lives in Nashville, TN) examines utopia, nation-building, and the archive within the expanded field of painting. She relies on elements of print media, cinema, design history, surrealism, and folklore to invoke parallel universes, investigating the disconnect between past projected futures and reality through altered and imagined space. Her interest in post-communist perception and the politics of memory lends itself to ambiguous images and hypnotic, dreamlike compositions that oscillate between flatness and true representation, further emphasizing a silent but steady descent into entropy.
Delanyo Mensah is a multidisciplinary artist and community builder passionate about creating inclusive communities. As an artist, Mensah’s work is centered around the beauty and complexity of her unique experiences as a queer first-generation Ghanaian-American woman. Through the mediums of photography, poetry, and mixed media, Mensah boldly challenges conventions and invites all to join in the journey of self-discovery and connection.
Jerry Bedor Phillips is an artist living and creating in Nashville, Tennessee. He is the building manager, studio assistant, and gallery coordinator for the Vanderbilt University Department of Art and for Space 204, the contemporary gallery space located in the E. Bronson Ingram Studio Arts Center. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in printmaking and drawing from Murray State University in 2007 and his Master of Fine Arts degree in printmaking and drawing from Bradley University in 2010.