Exhibitions (Spring 2024)
Begonia Labs
Petit Carême: Port of Spain, Trinidad through the lens of LeXander Bryant
On view from April 4 – May 23, 2024
Opening reception on Thursday, April 18 from 6:30-8:30 pm, and a discussion with the artist at the Lab on Thursday, May 2nd from 6-9 pm.
Begonia Labs, Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice (EADJ)
In September 2023, LeXander received support from the Engine of Art Democracy and Justice to travel to Port of Spain, Trinidad. He worked with artist Christopher Cozier on the Home Portal project and visited the Alice Yard contemporary art network. In his new exhibition, Petit Carême, LeXander shares his experience of traveling to Trinidad, which was the first place he has traveled outside of the United States.
While in Trinidad, LeXander reflected on the similarities and differences between Black culture and aesthetics happening in the lower Caribbean region with those of the American South. His exhibition at Begonia Labs will include photographs and videos that are organized into several subsections reviewing topics like the marketplace, community gatherings, and tropical scenery. Such topics have been documented and presented from the Caribbean region for decades following the influx of the tourist industry; however, LeXander places an interesting outlook on these topics through his viewpoint as a Black Southern photographer.
The title of the exhibition, Petit Carême, refers to a climate phenomenon that happens in Trinidad during the rainy season, around mid-September to mid-October; the climate phenomenon is a moment in the year with unusually brilliant sunshine that follows the regular rainfall. LeXander chose to adopt this term for the title of his showcase because it aligned with the time of year when his research trip took place in 2023, and it also poetically nods to a mini-break from the normal rhythms of his creative practice happening in Nashville.
About the Artist:
LeXander Bryant (b. 1989) is a photographer and visual artist based in Nashville, Tennessee, focused on capturing the essence of Black Folks, particularly in the American South. His work centers around the documentation & design of the black experience through stories of triumph, resilience, and cultural identity. LeXander has been featured in both group and solo exhibitions since 2016 and continues to collaborate with other creatives locally and internationally.
Artist’s website: https://www.orgnzdvisuals.com/about
LeXander also recently founded Archive South — an American southern-based multidisciplinary studio that emphasizesthe importance of artists as storytellers and cultural documentarians. It encourages artists to produce and share their ideas, creations, and reflections, recognizing that these contributions are valuable for capturing and archiving the essence of their experiences. Read more about the project here: www.archivesouth.com
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We’re Still Thinking
On view from April 26 – May 9, 2024
Opening reception and zine launch party on Friday, April 26 from 6-9 pm
Begonia Labs, Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice (EADJ)
We’re Still Thinking is a Vanderbilt student-led immersion project highlighting Blackness behind and in front of the camera through photoshoots. The project was created by Vanderbilt students Jeanne d’Arc Koffi, Igolo Stephine Ohalete, Les Taylor, and Sydney Featherstone. These students were mentored by a local photographer (LeXander Bryant), advised by the EADJ team on the Vanderbilt campus, and organized many volunteer models to capture a series of photographs.
The pictures collectively share intimate portraits around themes like dorm life on the Vanderbilt campus for queer BIPOC students, dorm life for first-generation Americans, reflections on Black womanhood, and reflections on friendship and coupling. The pictures captured by the student group have been placed into a pop-up exhibit at Begonia Labs, and they have also been published on an online platform and used to create a self-published zine for the students’ portfolios.
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Jose Luis Benavides: Video Experiments at Begonia Labs
On view February 8–March 8, 2024
Opening reception on Thursday, February 8 from 6:30-8:30 pm.
Begonia Labs, Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice (EADJ)
Vanderbilt Faculty, Jose Luis Benavides will have video and mix-media projects on exhibit at Begonia Labs. He will also host a series of conversations and film screenings with partner programs and his creative collaborators during his time at the art laboratory. Benavides has been exploring the relationship and tension between new media (3D animation and 3D printing practice) and old media (archives and research-based practice) alongside themes of social justice, queer temporalities, Latinidad, and immigration through experimental documentary filmmaking and video art techniques.
The program of events associated with this exhibition is Co-sponsored by Vanderbilt University’s Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies.
About the Artist:
Benavides is a Latinx and queer video artist who has been a programmer of Latinx video art and documentaries since 2018. His grant-funded program Sin Cinta Previa led him to curate Éramos Semilas / We Were Seeds at Stove Works in Chattanooga, TN during the summer of 2023. He serves as faculty at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee State University, and the City Colleges of Chicago. Previously, he has been a teaching artist with the National Museum of Mexican Art, Young Chicago Authors, Chicago Arts Partnership in Education, Nashville Public Library, and Chicago Public Library.
Bringing archival collections to life through moving images and mixed media installations, Benavides engages with a range of personal-to-institutional archives to participate in and preserve cultural memory. Through deep engagements with familial histories, marginalized histories, social movements, histories of the mental health industry, intergenerational and intercultural solidarity work alongside contemporary prison abolition work, his practice serves as a means of redress and healing, facing the tensions and traumas of our past, while working toward safer and communal futures.
He created commissioned work for the Chicago Film Archives (2023), Kindling Arts + Defy Film Festival (2022), and the Illinois Humanities’ Envisioning Justice (2019). His work has been viewed internationally, in Brussels, Hungary, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, and Turkey. He has had solo screenings and exhibitions at the Museum of Surgical Science (2023), Heaven Gallery (2023), The Nightingale Cinema (2022), and Biquini Wax (2019), and his first solo exhibition was at Terremoto magazine’s La Postal (2018).
Link to the artist’s website: www.joseluisbenavides.com