In The Between
featuring the work of
Stephanie Shih, Ronit Porat, Ksenia Ivanova, Gary Burnley, Luis Javier Maguiña, and Brigitte Bourger
September 17 - November 8, 2026
© Various Artists
Opening Reception
Thursday, September 17, 2026 from 6:15 - 8:00 PM
Curatorial Exhibition Walkthrough
Saturday, May 2, 2026 from 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Las mujeres han dado forma al lenguaje de la fotografía durante mucho tiempo, aportando visión y profundidad creativa al medio, muchas veces sin recibir un reconocimiento equivalente. En las últimas dos décadas, las mujeres en este campo han logrado mayor visibilidad e influencia, redefiniendo la profesión y los estándares institucionales. Organizaciones pioneras como el Houston Center for Photography (HCP) han sido fundamentales para este progreso. Durante 45 años, HCP ha honrado, apoyado y promovido de manera constante el trabajo de las mujeres, asegurando que sus voces estén firmemente presentes en el panorama fotográfico contemporáneo. Al tener a la mujer en cuenta como parte de su visión desde los inicios de su creación, el compromiso de HCP con la equidad sigue siendo un rasgo definitorio de su legado.
Chica Rebelde celebra a fotógrafas contemporáneas que exploran las múltiples dimensiones de la identidad femenina. Su trabajo pone de relieve la diversidad de experiencias, cuestiona los estereotipos y refleja los roles y percepciones de las mujeres en constante transformación.
Chica Rebelde incluye:
Luisa Dörr: La serie Imilla de Dörr documenta la cultura de mujeres skaters en Bolivia, donde las mujeres que usan faldas tradicionales polleras crean un puente entre la herencia cultural y la subcultura moderna.
Selina Román: En su serie de autorretratos abstracto, Román utiliza spándex de colores brillantes para transformar las curvas naturales de su cuerpo en campos geométricos de color, jugando con la forma y cuestionando la noción de exceso en la serie atinadamente titulada XS.
Jo Ann Chaus: En Conversaciones Conmigo Misma, Chaus reflexiona sobre los ideales de feminidad de mediados de siglo que marcaron su crianza, escenificando sus tensiones frente a la realidad de navegar un cuerpo que envejece en una era de positividad corporal
Juntas, estas artistas desafían la convención al mismo tiempo que celebran narrativas alternativas de la feminidad. Nuestra imagen estándar de una skater rara vez incluye vestimenta tradicional boliviana, las expectativas sobre el cuerpo femenino continúan limitadas por estándares estrechos de talla, y las visiones culturales sobre el envejecimiento y la belleza suelen marginar a las mujeres cuando van envejeciendo. Cada artista pone en primer plano estas excepciones, normaliza sus existencias e invita a reconsiderar la feminidad en sus diferentes etapas, desde la rebeldía juvenil hasta la reflexión madura.
Women have long shaped the language of photography, bringing vision and creative depth to the medium, often without equal recognition. Over the past two decades, women in the field have achieved greater visibility and influence, redefining the profession and institutional standards. Trailblazing organizations such as Houston Center for Photography (HCP) have been vital to this progress. For 45 years, HCP has consistently honored, supported, and advanced the work of women, ensuring their voices are firmly embedded in the contemporary photographic landscape. With women shaping its vision from the very beginning of its formation, HCP’s commitment to equity remains a defining part of its legacy.
Rebel Girl celebrates contemporary photographers engaging with the many dimensions of female identity. Their work highlights the diversity of experience, questioning stereotypes and illuminating the evolving roles and perceptions of women today.
Rebel Girl features:
Luisa Dörr: Dörr’s series Imilla documents female skater culture in Bolivia, where women wearing traditional pollera skirts bridge cultural heritage and modern subculture.
Selina Román: Román’s abstracted self-portraiture uses brightly colored spandex to transform the natural curves of her body into geometric color fields, playing with form and calling us to question excess in the aptly titled series XS.
Jo Ann Chaus: In Conversations with Myself, Chaus reflects on the mid-century ideals of femininity that shaped her upbringing, staging their tensions against the lived reality of navigating an aging body in an era of body positivity.
Together, these artists challenge convention while celebrating alternative narratives of femininity. Our standard image of a skater rarely includes traditional Bolivian attire, expectations of the female form continue to be bound by narrow standards of size, and cultural views of aging and beauty often marginalize women as they grow older. Each artist foregrounds these exceptions, normalizes their existence, and invites us to reconsider womanhood across its unfolding stages, from youthful rebellion to mature reflection.
Stephanie Shih:
STATEMENT
BIO
Ronit Porat: CHECK EDITS
Ronit Porat creates archival narratives through collage, recontextualizing historical photographs to construct layered visual stories. Her practice focuses on the interwar period, particularly Weimar Germany, using history to reflect on the present. More recently, her research has expanded to include women artists, photography, psychoanalysis, and the intersections of personal and collective memory. Working exclusively with archival images, Porat employs collage, manual processes, and optical devices to question how photographs shape our understanding of history. Rather than following linear narratives, her works create atmospheric encounters where history, memory, and fiction coexist. Stereoscopic imagery and recurring motifs of birds introduce ambiguity, movement, and distance, while resisting fixed identities and singular interpretations. At the core of her practice is an investigation into photography itself. She explores themes of voyeurism, documentation, patriarchy, and sexuality, asking a central question: who owns a photograph—the photographer, the subject, the archivist, or the viewer?
Ronit Porat (b. 1975) lives and works in Israel and Amsterdam. Porat is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice centers on photography, archival materials, and intricate collage. Rather than working as a traditional photographer, she recontextualizes historical and found images to explore themes of voyeurism, gender, and the ways the past shapes collective memory. Her work has been exhibited at, among other venues, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg; Museum of Photography, Berlin; August Macke House Museum, Bonn; City Museum, Cologne; Museum Van Loon, Amsterdam; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Haifa Museum of Art; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art; Sommer Salon, Zurich; Baudoin Lebon Gallery, Paris; Asymetria Gallery, Warsaw; Circle 1 Gallery, Berlin; Sabot Gallery, Cluj; Galerie der Stadt Wels, Austria; Indie Gallery, Tel Aviv–Jaffa; and Roja Art Lab, Latvia. Porat has received numerous awards and grants, including the Shpilman Fellowship, Photography Department, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2025); Plumas Art Foundation Grant (2024); Lauren and Mitchell Presser Photography Award, Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2017); Artis Grants for projects and exhibitions (2016, 2023); the Visual Arts Award from the Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sport (2022); the Creative Encouragement Award from the Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sport (2013); and the Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts Grant (2008). She was also an artist-in-residence at Artport (2012–2013) and the Jackman Goldwasser Residency at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago (2017). Her publication Hunting in Time was nominated for the Aperture First PhotoBook Award in 2023. Porat holds an MFA (2006) from Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, and a B.A. (2022) from the Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College. She is a founding member of Indie, a collaborative photography gallery.
Ksenia Ivanova:
A subtropical paradise of lush forests and Black Sea coastline—this stunning limbo is the reality of Abkhazia, a Georgian territory recognized by the majority of countries as occupied by Russia. Behind the scenic beauty lies a silent, decades-long conflict, leaving hundreds of thousands of displaced Georgians unable to return home. Between the Trees explores the ways long-term severance quietly transforms landscapes and local communities. The project maps the official structures of control and everyday forms of survival on both sides of the border, capturing its profound impact on the younger generation. Documenting a world of isolation and dependency, the work exposes how outside power rewrites geography, erases identity, and controls human lives.
Ksenia Ivanova is a Berlin-based visual artist with a background in documentary photography and a member of the Women Photograph collective. Her practice investigates the long-term aftermath of trauma, built upon years of immersive engagement with the communities she depicts. Her acclaimed series Between the Trees won the Lucie Foundation Documentary Scholarship and was named a finalist for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, the Gomma Grant, and the Women Photograph Project Grant, among other accolades. Nominated as a FUTURES Talent by the Deichtorhallen Hamburg museum, Ivanova has exhibited extensively across Europe, including a solo show at Leica Gallery. Her prints are held in private collections internationally, and her independent work has been featured in The Washington Post, Courrier International, XXI revue, and Der Spiegel.
Gary Burnley:
Our vision is filtered through personal experience and history. Growing up Black in America, contradiction demarcates how I am seen as well as how I see others. I think of being an artist as a way to identify and diagnose the paradox lurking just outside my frame of reference. The images I make are a way of addressing those dualities. I begin with misfit pieces of cultural vernacular, images that seemingly do not share the same heritage, meaning or purpose. A snapshot from a family album, for example, placed alongside an admired example of historical European or American portraiture. Through collage, alteration, recombination, the sharing of different lens, time, territory, pedigree, the two images are forced to amalgamate, to cohabitate, to live in each other’s world. Untethered from cultural frameworks, one consequence is the retort that ensues, the conversation between images. It is that dialog I find most interesting.
Gary Burnley (b. Saint Louis, Missouri) creates collages that reconfigure historical models of identity, beauty and social status from divergent visual fragments whose previous structure, meaning and historical importance, though no longer fully in tack, still live in the mind of the viewer. His amalgamations shift the reading of familiar narratives and generally accepted interpretations towards the discovery of what could not otherwise have been anticipated. BFA Washington University in Saint Louis, MFA, Yale University School of Art. A 2022 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and The Aftermath Project Finalist Grant, his work is part of museum and private collections including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX, Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo, TX, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, Light Work Collection, Syracuse, NY, Candela Collection, Richmond, VA, Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN., Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC.
Luis Javier Maguiña:
STATEMENT
BIO
Brigitte Bourger:
Untethered: I am drawn to the aerial view precisely when it loses its horizon. Without that line to orient the eye, every reference point dissolves; up and down, near and far, land and water no longer occupy their expected places. What remains is abstract in appearance, yet rooted in the real. Nothing is arranged or invented. Seen from above, coastlines and tidal zones become fluid expressions of light and texture, shaped by natural forces. This is the threshold that interests me most: the moment a landscape stops being read as landscape, and becomes something in between, a surface where recognition and abstraction meet.
Brigitte Bourger is a fine art photographer based in French Polynesia. Her book Éphémères Impressions received a Gold Medal at PX3 Paris and First Prize at TIFA Tokyo. She was recently exhibited at A Smith Gallery (Texas) and LightBox Gallery (Oregon).
About the Artists:
Stephanie Shih, Ronit Porat, Ksenia Ivanova, Gary Burnley, Luis Javier Maguiña,
and Brigitte Bourger
Questions?
For questions about this exhibition, please contact
Exhibitions and Programs Coordinator at exhibits@hcponline.org or 713-529-4755, ext 106.
