Fjolla Hoxha
January 3 - 25, 2025
Nashville, TN
Building a Passport Exhibition is a participatory performance exploring themes of displacement, restricted movement, and identity through the lens of bureaucracy and borders. The project invites participants to alter copies of Hoxha’s legal documents, transforming them into collaborative artworks that challenge notions of identity and privilege. A public performance will occur on January 3rd at 7 PM to create the exhibition, culminating in its final installation.
Sepideh Dashti
February 1 - 22, 2025
Memphis, TN
This exhibition showcases artwork created between 2022 and 2024, reflecting the Dashti’s personal journey as an Iranian immigrant woman navigating the impacts of political violence, exile, and the complexities of identity. Supported by Current Art Fund and a McColl Center residency, the works explore diaspora, feminism, and personal struggle, visually mapping the challenges of reclaiming identity in the face of displacement. Through this exploration, the pieces highlight the deeply intertwined nature of the personal and political, emphasizing the enduring difficulties of navigating mental well-being, family dynamics, and the broader socio-political landscape.
Chase Williamson
April 5 - 19, 2025
Souls Grown Deep explores the legacy of Southern Black gardens through large-scale scenic portraits and soil-filled installations, celebrating the healing and resilience cultivated by African American women. Drawing inspiration from familial ties and historical botany, the exhibition combines dynamic paintings with the sensory experience of soil, reclaiming the transformative power of gardening as a matrilineal and liberating practice.
Knoxville, TN
Cheryl Hazleton
May 3 - 24, 2025
Memphis, TN
This immersive installation explores themes of time, decay, labor, and the unseen worker through a durational performance where Hazelton will scrub the gallery floor with muddy water, leaving behind swirling patterns and soiled rags nailed to the walls. As the performance concludes, the space will be transformed into a living testament to labor. With viewers invited to engage, their footsteps will gradually erase the marks of work, emphasizing the transient nature of effort and its remnants.
DaShawn Lewis
June 7 - 21, 2025
Nashville, TN
Presence invites viewers to slow down and reflect on the overlooked moments of everyday life, encouraging a deeper connection to the present. Through photography and mixed media, including a basketball goal and interactive elements such as recordings or writings on the meaning of "presence," the exhibition creates a space for personal interpretation. Projected and removable images add a layer of impermanence, mirroring the fleeting moments preserved in photography and inspiring reflection on their significance.
Mikewendy
July 5 - 26, 2025
Nashville, TN
Diddley Drone is an interactive sound sculpture installation featuring 24 diddley bows made from upcycled materials, arranged in a city grid, with suspended plumb bobs inviting visitors to create sound. The installation reflects the blues' legacy and urban cultural shifts, exploring themes of growth, loss, and identity, while also featuring wall-mounted diddley bows for further interaction and engagement with the history of handmade instruments.
Will Sutton
August 2 - 23, 2025
Chattanooga, TN
long summer, Walter Forever! is an immersive exhibition exploring mental illness, masculinity, and addiction within Tennessee's skateboarding culture. By transforming COOP Gallery into a fabricated DIY skatepark, complete with wooden skate obstacles and 20-30 drawings and vinyl prints, the installation fosters a conversation about mental health and gender in a subculture often steeped in risk-taking and self-deprivation. Bridging art and community, the exhibition honors personal loss challenges harmful stigmas, and encourages more open and supportive dialogues within skateboarding and beyond.
Allie Horick
September 6 - 27, 2025
Nashville, TN
Soil Quilts is an installation-based exploration of family, death, connection, and impermanence, using soil collected from cemeteries and meaningful places tied to Horick’s ancestry. The exhibition features two soil quilts inspired by family patterns, alongside the remnants of a prior quilt—now a mixed pile of soils symbolizing entanglement and transformation. Accompanied by maps, photographs, and videos of collection sites, the installation invites viewers to witness both its creation and de-installation, with opportunities to participate by receiving samples of the blended soil, highlighting themes of memory and shared legacy.
Sophia Mason
October 4 - 24, 2025
Memphis, TN
Sophia Mason’s art practice unpacks Mormon visual culture as a small version of larger white American values. Of Plural Worlds depicts living in a false narrative and recognizing its deception. The first part traces white colonial Mormon narratives. The second part offers soft sculptures masquerading as museum displays while the artist unpacks her own history with these narratives. Of Plural Worlds shows how tempting it is to search for meaning in self-delusion.
Chelsea Couch
November 1 - 22, 2025
Chattanooga, TN
Chicken Tax explores fragile masculinity, gendered truck culture, and the intersection of custom vehicle culture with gender-affirming care through sculptures and installations, including a stainless-steel tableau, Truck Nutz, vinyl murals, and an unoccupied auto dealership ramp. The exhibition uses auto-body customization as a metaphor for gender identity, inviting dialogue about trans rights while reflecting on societal views of bodies, both human and mechanical, and their market value.