Visual Arts Gallery
Stephanie Dowda DeMer: Tell Us of the World
On view: March 19 - April 19, 2026
Closing Reception: April 15, 5-7pm
Location: 700 Peavine Creek Dr. Atlanta, GA 30322
Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday 9am-5pm
The Emory Visual Arts Gallery presents an installation by Stephanie Dowda DeMer.
Tell Us of the World is one of two concurrent exhibitions by Atlanta-based artist and current Emory Arts Fellow, Stephanie Dowda DeMer. The other, entitled Tell the World of Us, opens at WhiteSpace Gallery Shedspace. Both exhibitions examine the eroding connections between humans and nature and the irrevocable aspects of this loss. Tell Us of the World creates a space of art as ecological research. The gallery becomes a lab for examining Dowda DeMer’s unique camera-less 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.
Through a novel camera-less technique, I am 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. My 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.
For more information, please reach out to the artist: stephaniedowdademer@gmail.com or sdowda@emory.edu
Tiny Worlds: A Journey Through Interconnected Identities
On view: April 28 - May 10
Opening Reception: Tuesday, April 28, 5-7pm
Location: 700 Peavine Creek Dr. Atlanta, GA 30322
Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday 9am-5pm
The 2026 Visual Arts Capstone Exhibition
Tiny Worlds: A Journey Through Interconnected Identities is an art exhibition featuring the capstone works of graduating seniors in the Emory Visual Arts program. Structured as a collective exhibition composed of individual solo presentations, the show brings together six distinct artistic voices that each explore identity through intimate, layered, and often personal lenses. Across mediums and approaches, the works examine how identities are constructed, fragmented, remembered, and reimagined—tracing connections between the personal and the collective, the historical and the contemporary, the internal and the external.
Moving between dreamlike states, cultural memory, and material experimentation, Tiny Worlds invites viewers to consider how seemingly small, individual experiences reflect broader systems of meaning and belonging.
Anvitha Suram’s work explores the fluidity of identity through layered visual narratives that move between personal ritual, cultural translation, and contemporary reinterpretation. Drawing from her own experiences navigating different environments, she examines how meaning shifts when traditions are reframed or removed from their original context. Her practice spans photography, mixed media, and design, often incorporating process as a visible element—highlighting the tension between preservation and adaptation. Through interconnected pieces, Suram invites viewers to question what is retained, what is altered, and how identity is continuously reconstructed across spaces.
Dorien Johniken’s newest project, KUUMBA, explores the tension between historical, oppressive Baroque aesthetics and its potential for radical, contemporary liberation. Kuumba is the sixth principle of Kwanzaa, meaning “creativity” in Swahili, and commits to leaving communities more beautiful and beneficial than inherited through artistic expression, innovation, and restoring traditional greatness. Through his exhibition of digital paintings, he reimagines the 17th-century Baroque aesthetic through the lens of the Black diaspora, reclaiming the historically white, Eurocentric, and colonialist period.
Nacole Rhodes’ capstone is about love—friendly, familial, and romantic love that has changed her. Each piece is about someone specific and explores how she sees the people she loves, how they’ve made her feel, and how they’ve changed the way she sees herself.
Risa Lippe’s capstone project, Holy Spaces, examines the quiet rituals and environments through which meaning is constructed in everyday life. Working from observation and memory, Lippe’s paintings focus on intimate and domestic spaces where repetition and attention transform the ordinary into something charged with emotional and symbolic weight.
Soph Guerieri’s exhibition, Health External, explores how art and health are both deeply human and intrinsically intertwined through mixed media expression. Combining analog photography, printmaking, embroidery, and painting, the work examines the body as a layered site of biological, emotional, and lived experience.
Sydney Holden’s capstone pulls directly from the logic of dreams, where objects detach from their function and reappear altered, misplaced, or quietly watching. Figures and forms hover in that half-recognizable space, as if remembered wrong, carrying a muted emotional charge that feels both intimate and unreachable.
Together, these capstone projects by Anvitha Suram, Dorien Johniken, Nacole Rhodes, Risa Lippe, Soph Guerieri, and Sydney Holden highlight the power of individual perspective while emphasizing the connections that bind them. Tiny Worlds asks viewers to look closer—at the subtle, the personal, and the overlooked—and to consider how worlds are deeply interconnected.
Contact: dana.haugaard@emory.edu
