Craft + Photography – Houston Center for Contemporary Craft

Stephanie Bursese

Rene Henry — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 00:11:16 +0000

Stephanie Bursese is a Philadelphia-based multidisciplinary visual artist who has spent her life all along the East Coast, deeply embedded in many creative communities. Her work creates visual relationships between physical and psychological space using printed images, textiles, site-specific installations, book forms, sculpture, architectural elements, and other handmade objects. Often working through a feminist framework, her inspiration comes from research into behavioral patterns, personal and cultural trauma, embedded coping mechanisms, and how our environment affects our movement through developmental stages. Bursese investigates photography’s role in limiting perspective, both formally and as a concept, using loops, repetition, and doubling, to disrupt and develop doubt in the viewer.

Bursese earned her MFA from Syracuse University and her BFA from the University of Florida, both in photography, with minors in printmaking and art history. Her work has appeared in numerous group and solo exhibitions, publications, and museums, nationally and internationally, including The Aperture Foundation (NY), The Print Center (PA), Expo Chicago (IL), Cornell University (NY), Galerie Maison Kasini (Montreal), Everson Museum of Art (NY), Silver Eye Center for Photography (PA), The University of Virginia (VA), and many more. She is represented in both private and public collections. She was selected for a residency at the Fabric Workshop and Museum (2006); published her first book of photographs, Razor Thin Rock Hard (2013); released a second book in 2015, Belt and Brace; and was nominated for the MACK First Book Award in 2017.

To learn more about Stephanie Bursese, visit https://stephaniebursese.com/.

Stephanie’s residency was generously sponsored in part by Phyllis Childress

Bennie Flores Ansell

Rene Henry — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 21:34:28 +0000

Born in Manila, Philippines, Bennie Flores Ansell is a Houston-based visual artist. Working in themes that address migration patterns, light, shadow and murmuration forms, her work deconstructs and re-contextualizes photographic materials. She creates objects, installations, colorful light projections and photographs by manipulating and re-contextualizing 35 mm art history slides, mirrors, and other artifacts born from the medium of photography. She says that by breaking down the fundamentals of photography into light drawings, her projections distill meaning into a more transparent form. “The objects and installations carry weight, occupy space, and deconstruct image materials to reconstruct the presence of a missing image.”

Flores Ansell is a professor in the Art Department at the Houston Community College and previously taught at the High School of Performing and Visual Arts. She holds an MFA in photography from the University of Houston and a BA in photography from the University of South Florida. She was awarded an American Photography Institute Fellowship at New York University and was an artist-in-residence at the Asia Society Museum in Houston. Her works are in many private collections and have been exhibited nationally and internationally at the International Center for Photography, Festival De La Luz in Argentina; the Daegu Photography Biennale in South Korea; Uno Art Space, Stuttgart, Germany; and Patricia Conde Galeria in Mexico City.

To learn more about Bennie Flores Ansell’s work, visit: https://www.benniefloresansell.com/.

Stephanie J. Woods

Rene Henry — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 19:00:33 +0000

Stephanie J. Woods is a multimedia artist from Charlotte, NC, currently based in Albuquerque, NM, where she is an assistant professor of interdisciplinary art at the University of New Mexico. Her work fuses a relationship between photography and fiber. Her passion for interdisciplinary practices and material language is evident through her collaborations and implementation of symbolic materials that examine performative behavior, domestic spaces, and alternative realities that reference Black American culture and her experiences growing up in the American South.

Woods earned an MFA in new media sculpture and is the recipient of several residencies and fellowships, including Black Rock Senegal, the Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, ACRE Residency, the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists Residency, and Penland School of Craft. Her work is featured in the permanent collection at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, in Richmond, VA. She has also exhibited her work at Smack Mellon and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, both located in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been featured in BOMB Magazine, Art Papers, Burnaway, and the Boston Art Review.

To learn more about Stephanie J. Woods, visit:

https://www.stephaniejwoods.com/

Hillerbrand+Magsamen

Rene Henry — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 06:51:48 +0000

Hillerbrand+Magsamen’s practice utilizes collaboration, process, and media experimentation through video, photography, installation, sculpture, and interdisciplinary performance. They explore their relationships to each other and society with an uncanny sensibility that merges the real and unreal, blurring boundaries between life and art, and often include their two children, Maddie and Emmett, in their work.

Hillerbrand+Magsamen’s work has been presented at festivals such as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX), CounterCurrent Festival (Houston, TX), and Diffusion Photography Festival (Wales, UK). Exhibitions include the Grand Rapids Art Museum (Grand Rapids, MI), Everson Museum (Syracuse, NY), and Center for Photography Woodstock (Woodstock, NY). They have received grants from Sustainable Arts Foundation, Austin Film Society, Houston Arts Alliance, and Experimental Television Center and participated in numerous residency programs, including Wassaic Projects (Wassaic, NY), Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), I-Park (East Haddam, CT), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (New York, NY), Experimental Television Center (Owego, NY), Elsewhere (Greensboro, NC), Lawndale Art Center (Houston, TX), and Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM).

Stephan Hillerbrand is an associate professor at the University of Houston. Mary Magsamen is the curator at Aurora Picture Show. For more information, visit http://www.hillerbrandmagsamen.com/.