Join us for the opening reception of strike-through, a solo exhibition by Stephanie Bursese featuring new work from the past three months that Bursese has been the Craft + Photography artist-in-residence at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and the Houston Center for Photography.

strike-through is a site-specific installation featuring risographs, photography, and hand-made textile pieces created in response to practices in language and photography that advance the erasure of specific histories. Creating a repeated pattern of prehistoric rock formations taken on Indigenous Ancestral Pueblo land in New Mexico, the individual images are both a composite of ancient rock materials and are themselves re-composed into a new formation on the wall. The photographs that hang over this “ground”—taken in Galveston, TX, Joshua Tree, CA, and on the same indigenous land near Santa Fe, NM—examine pathways between deep time and the present. The symbols in the needlework serve as a metaphor, bringing an interpretation of handwriting into the vocabulary of the installation. Here we can see the edits, cuts, duplication, and accumulation of material.      

“How to make meaning?” is one of the core questions in both my personal life and artistic practice. This “life question”—inspired by Andrea Zittel’s question “How to live?”—has guided my research into behavioral patterns, repetition, trauma, embedded coping mechanisms, and how our environment affects our movement through developmental stages. Working through a psychological anthropology framework, I have traced these areas of study into larger systems of control, i.e. patriarchy and mass industrialization. These systems have counterparts focused on direct opposition: women’s liberation, labor unions, and the resurgence of contemporary craft. My artwork is a product of these intersections, functioning as a way for me to make meaning of the world, specifically as a form of resistance.