from within, so together

Mona Bozorgi & Tokie Rome-Taylor

September 11 - October 16

from within, so together

Mona Bozorgi & Tokie Rome-Taylor

Curated by Ashley Kauschinger

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 11, 6 - 9 pm

Artist Talk: Saturday, September 13, 3 pm

Exhibition Dates: September 11 - October 16

The Swan Coach House Gallery is pleased to present from within, so together, an interdisciplinary photography exhibition featuring Florida-based artist, Mona Bozorgi, and Atlanta-based artist, Tokie Rome-Taylor. The exhibition opens on Thursday, September 11 from 6 - 9 pm and will be on view through October 16.

from within, so together, pairs the work of interdisciplinary photographers Mona Bozorgi and Tokie Rome-Taylor. Both artists reframe photographic representation by decolonizing imagery and challenging historical and contemporary portrayals of women, Iranians, and African Americans. Their practices blend photography with textiles, sculpture, installation, archival processes, and digital techniques, creating boundary-crossing forms that explore the symbolic exchange between culture, image, and object. In dialogue, their work shares a commitment to challenging dominant photographic traditions and expanding the language of identity, memory, and belonging.

Mona Bozorgi examines the power dynamics of representing women in Iran, where government control extends into daily life through surveillance and mandated veiling. Working with images of women in protest collected online, she prints them on silk and then methodically removes threads, creating compositions that recall both geometric Islamic design and historical photographic traditions while subverting state control representation. Her process of revealing and concealing through the manipulation of fabric mirrors the tension between visibility and erasure that defines Iranian women's experience. This removal of threads also transforms how we perceive the image, compelling the viewer to adjust their perspective. As viewers adapt their view to comprehend the altered images, they are asked to consider how control, concealment, and resistance shape the ways women are seen or unseen.

Tokie Rome-Taylor, Grounding (detail)

Tokie Rome-Taylor addresses the archival gaps left by slavery and systemic erasure, asking what happens when there is no photographic evidence of those who came before us. Drawing from her experience as a "daughter of the Diaspora," she creates contemporary visual folktales through constructed images that center African American children, often her own family. Her practice combines cyanotypes, textiles, and found objects to construct speculative visual histories that serve as a form of pilgrimage for future ancestry. By honoring women's work through sewing, family documentation, and memory preservation, Rome-Taylor's tactile, layered compositions create contemporary artifacts that fill historical voids. Her manipulation of photographic surfaces transforms traditional photography into something beyond pure vision, incorporating body knowledge and spiritual connection to land and lineage.

Together, Bozorgi and Rome-Taylor reveal how the photographic image can be reworked into something tactile, embodied, and resistant. Using photography as an art form that not only remembers but also reimagines, their works stand as acts of reclamation, expanding the possibilities of image-making as a language of survival, presence, and belonging.

Mona Bozorgi

Mona Bozorgi is an artist-scholar whose interdisciplinary research and artistic practice explore the correlation between representation and performativity in photography. Her research is intertwined with posthuman critical theory and focuses on the process of the materialization of bodies and its impact on the construction and production of identities. Bozorgi's recent work blends photography, textiles, and installation and explores the entanglement between the materiality of photographs and their meanings. Her work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries in the U.S. and internationally. In 2024, she was featured in the Florida Prize for Contemporary Art Exhibition, selected as a Critical Mass Top 50, and was a recipient of the Houston Center for Photography Fellowship. Bozorgi holds a Ph.D. in Fine Arts with a focus on Critical Studies and Artistic Practice from Texas Tech University and an MFA in Photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). She is an Assistant Professor of Photography and the head of the Photography and Moving Image area in the Department of Art at Florida State University.

Tokie Rome-Taylor

Atlanta native Tokie Rome-Taylor is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Her practice investigates familial and cultural archives of African Americans in the south through what has been shared and passed down. She explores themes of memory, spirituality, visibility and identity.

Rome-Taylor’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally with an exhibition record that includes The Georgia Museum of Art, The New Gallery at Austin Peay University, Hammonds House Museum, The Atlanta Contemporary, the Fralin Museum, The Griffin Museum of Photography, and SP-Foto SP-Arte Fair in São Paulo, Brazil amongst others. Her work is held in multiple public and private collections including the Coca-Cola Corporation, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, The Fralin Museum at the University of Virginia, and the Southeastern Museum of Photography.

**Ashley Kauschinger**

Ashley Kauschinger is an artist, curator, and educator based in Atlanta, GA. She has worked on significant projects that cultivated the arts in Atlanta and beyond with organizations such as the Atlanta Center for Photography, MINT, The Light Factory Photo Arts Center, Lenscratch, and the Society for Photographic Education, among others. From 2012 to 2019, she founded the online photography magazine Light Leaked, which created national conversations about contemporary photography through exhibitions, interviews, and reviews.
Kauschinger received her BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design and her MFA from Texas Woman's University. She previously taught Photography and Curatorial Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the University of South Carolina, and Maine Media Workshops + College. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Georgia Gwinnett College.

This exhibition is sponsored by Robyn Barkin and Eileen Millard.

FAF is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the visual arts in Atlanta. Founded in 1965, FAF supports cultural programming and individual artists through grants and a variety of programs.