Iranian-American Raheleh Filsoofi is a poet, sculptor, and performance artist, but her process begins with the most fundamental need of a ceramist: mining clay. Through a laborious and meditative process of collecting soil from sites in Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Mississippi and Florida, she distills and processes the dirt’s traces of clay into slip that she shapes into traditional forms. For our premiere exhibition, Filsoofi perches ceramic vessels atop and inside open wooden pedestals that evoke centuries of plundered antiquities. Contemporary life asserts itself through wires spilling out of the vessels and rising to the ceiling. They power hidden speakers playing ambient sounds from the Southern region merged with traditional Iranian music by Reza Filsoofi. Reflecting the artist’s daily soundscape, the layered audio evokes memory, displacement, and the tension of navigating between geographies. Filsoofi’s work is the result of her lived experience as a woman, immigrant, and artist, in a time when being any of the three is cause for an abundance of caution. 

Nashville-native Vadis Turner’s textile-based, mixed media sculptures consider feminine cultural conventions and behavioral expectations within the broader historical context of the South as well as the male-centric prism that dominates modern art history. Known for large-scale installations and tabletop vessels, Turner presents her latest body of work: curtains that have been materially transformed from window treatments into portals of varying scale that line the gallery walls. Prompted by the monolithic, rigid grid of mid-century modernism, Turner calls the building blocks of these compositions “quilt squares,” and she refers to them as “shape-shifting icons of femininity, each grid is composed of retired drapery that has been stripped, hand-sewn into new proportions and gilded. The golden-skinned forms hang from pins on the wall, gridded yet elastic geometric structures that are stirred and enlivened, rather than rigid. Draped like intimate garments, and metallic like armor, the works embody the sensuality and malleability of the female-identifying experience.” Whether bowed, quivering, splintered or pinched, her pieces jettison past oppression, in essence shredding the cherished heirloom materials of domestic life.

Raheleh Filsoofi will simultaneously open a solo exhibition at the Telfair Museum, Savannah, running May 30 - Sept 7, 2025. Filsoofi is a 2023 Joan Mitchell Fellow, 2023 MacDowell Fellow, and currently Assistant Professor in Ceramics at Vanderbilt  University, with recent solo shows at Vanderbilt, The Gibbes Museum and Atlanta Contemporary, among other institutions.

Vadis Turner’s monumental outdoor piece, Venus Rising, has just opened at LongHouse Reserve, East Hampton, NY, and her work was recently exhibited at and acquired by Museum of Art and Design in New York City. Turner has been  exhibited widely at institutions including solo shows at The Huntsville Museum of Art, the Frist Art Museum, Abroms-Engel Institute for Visual Arts, and University of Colorado Colorado Springs, among other museum and gallery shows.