“I Shall Bring You to the Garden's Edge” is an exhibition of artworks by UNCW Assistant Professor, Shabnam Jannesari opening in the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Cultural Arts Building (CAB) Art Gallery on Thursday, September 17, 2026
The exhibition will run through Wednesday, October 21, 2026
A public opening reception will be held on Thursday, September 17, 2026 from 5:30 p.m. – 7 p.m. Shabnam Jannesari will give an artist talk before the reception at 5 p.m. in the Cultural Arts Building, Room 2033.
Gallery hours are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. with extended hours on Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
The CAB Art Gallery is located on UNCW’s campus on the ground floor of the Cultural Arts Building, near the building's main entrance. Visitors can access the gallery from South College Road or Racine Drive, and parking is available in front of the box office entrance to the building.
For more information visit https://uncw.edu/seahawk-life/arts/venues/cultural-artsbuilding/
and https://linktr.ee/cabartgallery
In I Shall Bring You to the Garden’s Edge, I create imagined spaces in which women can exist beyond the social expectations and restrictions of everyday life. The exhibition draws on the idea of heterotopia, a concept introduced by Michel Foucault to describe spaces that exist apart from, or in contrast to, ordinary social structures. In my work, I am interested in heterotopic space not as a specific physical location, but as a space
that can exist within the imagination. Through painting, I reinvent familiar domestic interiors and transform them into abstracted, highly emotive worlds. Saturated color, layered pattern, altered perspective, and shifting spatial relationships allow these environments to move away from everyday reality. Within them, the women I paint can
exist outside conventional expectations and inhabit spaces defined by intimacy, support, and quiet power. These imagined heterotopic worlds offer a way of pushing realities aside and creating alternative spaces in which the women in my art and in my life can exist on their own terms.
My process usually begins with photographs taken in my family home in Iran, along with vintage family photographs. I often photograph interiors and figures from unusual or aerial perspectives, sometimes climbing onto and balancing on furniture in order to find the viewpoint I want. Rather than translating these photographs directly into paintings, I cut, rearrange, and combine them into collages. Through collage, I bring together
spaces, perspectives, and moments that did not originally coexist, allowing me to construct my own heterotopic compositions. I then make large acrylic drawings on paper based on these collages. These drawings allow me to work through questions of scale, composition, value, and spatial relationships. I continue adding, removing, and altering imagery until the structure begins to feel resolved, and only then do I begin the painting. My bright, highly saturated palette is deeply connected to childhood memories, particularly the Persian carpet in my grandparents’ home. This carpet has gradually become a symbol of an ideal or imagined world in my work—a kind of garden or paradise that exists outside ordinary conventions. Through color and pattern, I construct
a dream-space in which memory can be altered, extended, and reinvented. My saturated palette contributes to this sense of an alternate reality. I intensify colors, juxtapose unexpected hues, and allow colors to reflect onto surrounding figures and objects. Rather than reproducing observed color, I amplify and invent it. This departure
from naturalistic color helps create the sense that the figures inhabit another world—an intimate, secret, and supportive space that has been imagined into existence. In works such as Azin Is Getting Married, for example, pattern causes the figure to merge with her surroundings. I am interested in the idea that cultural traditions and
restrictions can remain embedded in the body and memory even when they are no longer physically present. In my paintings, pattern can therefore operate simultaneously as beauty, memory, tradition, and restriction. It can envelop the figure while also becoming part of her. Their flattened forms give me permission to move between
representation and abstraction and to allow pattern to function as more than ornament. My paintings are generally large-scale, highly saturated oils in which the figures approach life size. I use fluid contour lines and try to preserve the immediacy of drawing rather than rendering every form tightly. I want the paintings to retain a sense of movement and uncertainty, allowing figures, patterns, and spaces to shift between representation and abstraction. Working in this way gives me room to invent rather than simply describe. Through altered perspective, saturated color, and flattened pattern, I construct environments that depart from everyday reality and become psychological spaces—worlds shaped by memory, imagination, cultural inheritance, and the desire for freedom.
Biography
Shabnam Jannesari is an Iranian-born artist whose work has been exhibited extensively across the United States and internationally. She received her Master of Fine Arts, with distinction, from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. In Spring 2027, Shabnam is invited to present a solo exhibition at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is also selected for the residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Spring 2027. Shabnam's recent solo exhibition, She Sat Where the Light Awaited, was presented at the Erie Art Museum (Erie, PA, 2026). Her recent exhibitions include Made in the Plains at the Joslyn Art Museum (Omaha, NE, 2025) and Look but Look with Love, a two-person exhibition at the NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY, 2024). Previous solo exhibitions include Each String is a Thread, Each Color a Chord at the Nebraska Arts Council (Omaha, NE, 2023) and The Carpet Grew Like a Garden at Gallery 263 (Cambridge, MA, 2021). Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including the Mid-Atlantic Biennial at the University of Mary Washington (VA), A Pot Nudged into Oblivion at Miranda Art Project Space (New York, NY), Narrative Imperative at the University of Connecticut, and Domestic State at Wheaton College (MA). Her paintings are held in both private and institutional collections, including Fidelity Investments and the University of Massachusetts School
of Law. She is the recipient of two Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grants (2020, 2022) and the Distinguished Art Fellowship at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (2018–2021). In 2025, she was selected to attend the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture residency. Jannesari's paintings construct dreamlike domestic spaces in which women inhabit worlds of freedom, intimacy, and self-determination. Through large-scale figurative oil paintings, she imagines private interiors that stand in stark contrast to the social realities
of contemporary Iran. While rooted in Persian culture and her own lived experience, her work speaks more broadly to women's lives within patriarchal societies. Drawing on history, politics, philosophy, and Persian visual traditions, she explores the symbolic and psychological potential of domestic space, often using the Persian carpet as both a cultural and conceptual motif. Rich, saturated color plays a central role in her practice. These imagined spaces invite viewers into an another world where beauty, resilience, and quiet resistance coexist.
Jannesari is currently Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
https://shabnamjannesari.com/
