Opening Reception for Vesna Pavlović's "No Ordinary Sunsets" + Works by Stephanie Dowda DeMer, Neill Prewitt

From the venue:

Join Whitespace this Saturday for the opening reception of No Ordinary Sunsets, Vesna Pavlović’s fourth solo exhibition with Whitespace. 

No Ordinary Sunsets

The exhibition brings together three new bodies of work which continue the artist’s exploration of questions of memory and the politics of place, with a focus on photographic representation of political and cultural histories of Cold War era. Non-Aligned Visualities is the new series of photographs inspired by the four yearlong collaborative research project Prefabricating Solidarity: IMS Žeželj between Yugoslavia, Cuba, and Angola, exhibited at the Museum of African Art in Belgrade Serbia and the Engine for Art, Democracy, and Justice Begonia Labs in Nashville, US in 2025. Focusing on the transfer and details of this original building method developed in former Yugoslavia in the 1970s, these photographs talk about architecture as a shared and lived experience. Sometimes I can hear the ocean in my ears (2024) captures scenes at Jibacoa, Cuba, formerly a sugar cane plantation owned by the chocolate magnate Milton Hershey. The factory closed in 1958, but the lush park remained, with the yagroumo tree leaves falling to the ground like fragile shells. The third series, Searching for a perfect sunset features an experimental work artist produced in Joshua Tree, CA in 2022, during an artist in residency at BoxoPROJECTS art program. A grid of nine color photographs presents a performative quest to frame a perfect sunset in the Joshua Tree Park, using a box of vintage 35mm slides sourced off eBay.

Tell Us of the World/Tell the World of Us

Stephanie Dowda DeMer’s exhibitions titled Tell Us of the World/Tell the World of Us span two locations concurrently. Opening at WhiteSpace Gallery Shedspace on March 14th and Emory Visual Arts Gallery on March 19th, 2026.

Dowda DeMer’s simultaneous installations examine the eroding connections between humans and nature and the irrevocable aspects of this loss. Through a novel cameraless technique, Dowda DeMer is documenting plant fluorescence to reveal the otherwise invisible luminous bodies of plants directly onto silver-halide emulsions. Further photographic inquiry into ecological field studies makes visible ongoing research to understand our world. The sculptural cameras are creating durational in-gallery and garden chlorophyll prints that evoke a sense of reciprocity and conversation with light. Central to this project is the interdisciplinary connection with photo-scientific inquiry; the emergence of photography relied equally on communication within scientific communities and on experimentation in the metaphysical, to explore the permanence of the world and the language of the lens. In the midst of fallow curiosity, reigniting this relationship confirms our nature as guided by light.

At Emory University, the installation Tell Us of the World creates a space of art as ecological research. The gallery becomes a lab for examining Dowda DeMer’s unique cameraless process for visualizing plant fluorescence and understanding the interdependent relationship we share with plants. Dowda DeMer’s practice extends into ecology, physics, and Emory’s Herbarium, with each investigative lens represented and intermixed with the epistemology of art. In shedspace @ Whitespace, the installation imagines a future in which plants are the only beings that retain a memory of humans, and light is the medium for their memories. Entering Shedspace, we are bathed in light, like plants, and encounter a chance to see time splintered from human influence.

Lullaby

In Lullaby, Prewitt’s performances are a means to investigate his life as an artist and new parent. They arise from songs written at the changing table in his daughter’s nursery, and phrases he repeats to himself throughout the day, when time is tighter yet more full than ever before. Realized through sculpture, video, and installation, they include collaborations with sculptor Casey McGuire and musician JD Walsh. The artworks resonate simultaneous gratitude and frustration, openness and confinement, plenitude and limitation.