ONLINE EXHIBITIONS
The Texas Medical Center Orchestra (TMCO) presented Russian Fireworks on Saturday, May 9, 2026 at 7:00pm at Zilkha Hall at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts.
The program featured three iconic works of the Russian repertoire: Glinka’s electrifying Overture to Ruslan and Lyudmila, Rachmaninoff’s monumental Piano Concerto No. 3 featuring Houston-based pianist Diego Caetano, Associate Professor at Sam Houston State University, and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (orch. Ravel).
Blending virtuosic performance with visual storytelling, Russian Fireworks offered a compelling exploration of how music and visual art intersect. In a special collaboration with the Houston Center for Photography (HCP), photographic imagery was projected behind the orchestra during Pictures at an Exhibition, creating an immersive, multimedia concert experience.
“Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do at TMCO,” said Libi Lebel, TMCO Artistic Director. “I strongly believe in highlighting the incredible talent within our own community, and partnering with the Houston Center for Photography brings that vision to life in a meaningful way.”
Tickets and additional information are available at: https://tmcorchestra.org
this program is supported in part by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance
CURATORIAL STATEMENT: In making selections for this curatorial pairing, it was important not only to evoke the mood of the music, but also to step away from literal interpretation. We are no longer in 1873, and rather than reconstructing Mussorgsky’s immediate world, this exhibition sets the stage through a global, contemporary lens. The images—drawn from artists exhibited over the past three years at the Houston Center for Photography—form a visual counterpoint to the score, inviting resonance rather than illustration.
At the center of this dialogue is the young boy from the Promenade, drawn from River Claure’s photographic interpretation of The Little Prince. He becomes both guide and subject—at once standing in for Mussorgsky and the viewer—wandering the exhibition as both observer and artwork itself. This felt a fitting parallel: like the stranded pilot in The Little Prince (1943), who learns to look beyond the superficial to understand love, friendship, and responsibility, Mussorgsky, too, confronts absence. Composing Pictures at an Exhibition after encountering the works of his deceased friend Hartmann, the music unfolds as a series of recollections—fragmented, tender, and at times disquieting—suggesting the lessons we carry forward from those most significant in our lives.
—Anne Leighton Massoni
-
The Promenade introduces the boy as he enters the frame, establishing a rhythm of movement and return that mirrors the structure of the music. In Gnomus, I was struck by the understanding that Mussorgsky was interpreting his departed friend’s work; here, rather than leaning on literal translation, the images move into the connotative—ominous, fractured, and unsettled. Shadows, disembodied flowers, mirrored forms, and sharp angles create a sense of psychological tension before we return again to the Promenade.
In Il vecchio castello, the castle’s imposing façade transforms into portals—both natural and manmade—alongside soaring edifices and decaying infrastructures. The boy stands atop a rockface, looking outward and downward, poised between awe and contemplation. With Tuileries, the tone shifts to levity: children at play in nature, gestures of grace, exuberance, and fleeting joy.
Bydlo enters with weight and stillness. A constructed bull—both man and beast—anchors the sequence. Here, I lingered on a single image to suggest the focused gaze that sometimes overtakes us in a gallery: a moment of sustained attention amid otherwise fleeting encounters.
The boy continues to Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells, where images move in a lively back-and-forth between birds and flowers. Highly constructed yet playful, they engage color, humor, and rhythm, as if the boy is moving quickly between them, captivated by their puzzles and delight.
In Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle, no longer two men but figures reimagined as women, the tone becomes intimate and serious. Their presence commands attention. The insertion of a Venus flytrap suggests a conversation that feels at once strained and familiar—dialogue shaped by time, tension, and enduring connection is reinforced with the image of the elder couple.
Movement and multiplicity return in Limoges: The Market, where groups shift in and out of view, suggesting the jostling energy of a bustling environment. Scenes unfold just beyond one another, yet we return to the skater girls in bright skirts as they shop, engage, and perhaps haggle—serving as a visual refrain.
With Catacombae, we descend into a more brooding space. Entry comes through the image of hands grasping stone—at once pulling upward and being drawn deeper below the surface. We move through images of entombment and suspension: Ophelia, ice and snow, cavernous formations, and the intermittent hope of light breaking through darkness.
This darkness deepens in Cum mortuis in lingua mortua, where the landscape becomes ominous and expansive. A swirling night sky, bending trees, cosmic imagery—both imagined and documented—and the moon reflected across water and ice create a sense of disorientation. As the movement progresses, the night seems to press inward on a solitary figure.
Strangeness emerges in The Hut on Fowl’s Legs (Baba-Yaga)—a space that is at once unsettling and oddly playful. Here, the boy cannot decide whether to be amused or afraid.
Finally, The Great Gate of Kiev opens into awe and release. The imagery begins with breathtaking landscapes, intensified through photographic processes that capture heat rather than light, before shifting toward celebration—party lights, flowing silk and tulle, movement caught in wind. The sequence oscillates between the natural world and human joy, building toward a sense of exaltation. I imagine Mussorgsky, in viewing his friend’s work, marveling at its beauty and its ability to move us—to validate, to overwhelm, to endure.
In the final moments, reflection and transcendence converge. The boy encounters a mirrored presence—his friend, perhaps, or himself—and begins to leap, carried by memory. The last image suggests a passage: the friend as a star, moving on, while the boy remains—changed, but continuing forward.
When we are confronted with loss, our emotions are never singular. Grief is interwoven with joy, bewilderment, compassion, grace, and gratitude. We remember those we have loved in all their complexity, carrying them with us as we continue our own lives—shaped by the beauty and depth of what they have left behind.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS (in the order in which they appear in the performance): River Claure, Oskar Alvarado, Sandra Klein, Xuan-Hui Ng, tamara suarez porras, Kristina Barker, Julianna Foster, Joshua Yates, Susan Isaacson, Sam Jentsch, Deborah Jack, Luisa Dörr, Charles Ford, Allison Plass, Sirkhane Darkroom Children, Damien Jackson, Jason DeMarte, Ziesook You, Ryan Frigillana, Aimee McCrory, Marc Ohrem-Leclef, Christine Elfman, Alejandra Regalado, Jessica Hays, Carlos Ocando, Christopher Lowell, Granville Carroll, Keith Belzner, Shaina Nyman, Linda Plaisted, Emma Ressel, Katie Kehoe, Jamie Robertson, Adam Ekberg, Thomas Jackson, Brad Carlile, Jonas Yip, Lin Wen-Hang
*each artist is represented here by a single image, bios for each artist can be found below images
River Claure
Oskar Alvarado
Sandra Klein
Xuan-Hui Ng
tamara suarez porras
Kristina Barker
Julianna Foster
Joshua Yates
Susan Isaacson
Sam Jentsch
Charles Ford
Deborah Jack
Allison Plass
Fotohane Darkroom
Damien Jackson
Jason DeMarte
Ziesook You
Ryan Frigillana
Aimee McCrory
Luisa Dörr
Marc Ohrem-Leclef
Alejandra Regalado
Christine Elfman
Jessica Hays
Carlos Ocando
Christopher Lowell
Granville Carroll
Keith Belzner
Shaina Nyman
Linda Plaisted
Emma Ressel
Katie Kehoe
Jamie Robertson
Thomas Jackson
Brad Carlile
Adam Ekberg
Jonas Yip
Lin Wen-Hang
-
River Claure (1997) is a Bolivian photographer and visual artist known for his carefully constructed portraits and magical, atmospheric landscapes. His work interrogates dominant ideas of cultural identity and the role of photography in shaping reality. Born to a migrant family from a small Andean highland community, he grew up in the city negotiating tensions between his Indigenous roots and contemporary urban life. Trained in Cochabamba and later in Madrid, he has exhibited internationally. In 2024 he participated in the main exhibition of the 60th Venice Art Biennale. He has collaborated with major global media and lives in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
-
Oskar Alvarado is a Spanish visual artist whose photographic work has been exhibited at the Instituto Cervantes in Belgrade, National Museum of Helsinki, Fotonoviembre Atlántica Colectivas, Photo Israel, Verzasca Foto Festival, Addis Foto Fest or Angkor Photo Festival.
His work has been recognized in awards such as Sarajevo Photography Festival, Kolga Tbilisi Photo Award, Gomma Photography Grant, Photo Collective Stories, Festival Images Gibellina, Lucie Foundation Fine Art Scholarship, Restart Lithuanian Photographers Association or PEP Photographic Exploration Project among others and and winner of the Fujifilm Photography Grant at XXIII Photography and Journalism Seminar of Albarracín. -
Sandra Klein is an artist whose images, whether captured with a camera or composited, portray a layered world which, though filled with anxiety and trauma, still is rich with joy. She was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey and received a BFA from Tyler School of Fine Art in Philadelphia, Pa and An MA in Printmaking from San Diego State University. Her images have been shown throughout the United States and Abroad and she has had one person shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography, both the Lishiu and Yixian Festivals in China, Studio Channel Islands, the A Smith Gallery in Texas and Photographic Gallery SMA in San Miguel Allende, Mexico and Atlanta Photography Group. She was the recipient of the Lorser Feitelson Grant jointly with artist Betye Saar.
She is represented by Photographic Gallery SMA in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and Walker Fine Art Gallery in Denver, Colorado.
-
Xuan-Hui was born in Singapore and currently lives in Japan. She began photography as a form of self-therapy. She now photographs to celebrate and eternalize her serendipitous encounters with the natural world. In 2022, she was interviewed by BBC World Service’s Cultural Frontline on “Creativity and Mental Health.” She is a contributor to ELEMENTS landscape photography magazine and has written for Lenscratch. Her work was featured in solo exhibitions at the Koslov Larsen Gallery and the Griffin Museum of Photography, and was most recently part of the group exhibition “Rapt in Wonder” at the Houston Center for Photography.
-
tamara suarez porras (they/she) is an artist, writer, and educator from (south) Brooklyn, NY and based in the San Francisco Bay Area. tamara’s work considers seeing, remembering, forgetting, and how photography attempts to know the unknowable. tamara has exhibited nationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Houston Center for Photography, California Institute of Integral Studies, Root Division, Kala Art Institute, Your Mood Projects, and Bedford Gallery. tamara is a graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and California College of the Arts, and is a Lecturer in Photography at Stanford University.
-
Guided by her introspective sense of place, Kristina examines themes around human consciousness reflected in nature. In her search for belonging, she investigates the idea of where our physical and non-physical worlds intertwine. Her practice is heavily influenced by the idea of memory and enduring grief. Kristina is a freelance photojournalist living in Portland.
-
Julianna Foster is an artist and educator in Philadelphia, PA. She earned a BFA in Design from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (2001) and an MFA in Book Arts + Printmaking from the University of the Arts (2006). Foster has exhibited work nationally and internationally, in private collections across the country, and her photographs, essays, and interviews are included in many publications. She has collaborated with various artists on projects, including creating artist multiples, artist books, and a series of photographs, videos and has self-published two books.
-
Joshua Yates is a photographer based in Savannah, Georgia. His journey started at 15 in a high school darkroom, sparking a lifelong connection to analog photography. His current work combines medium and large format film with traditional darkroom and alternative photographic processes.
Through his lens, he explores themes of solitude, loss, and transformation, particularly in abandoned industrial spaces and forgotten architecture. An emerging artist with recent group exhibition features, Yates is expanding his documentary scope through cross-country travels in a former Amazon delivery van, capturing America's overlooked spaces along the way. -
Susan Isaacson is a photographic artist exploring themes of time, memory, and the emotional topography of life transitions. She is drawn to the natural landscape to connect with and represent her inner world. Following a twenty-year career in strategic marketing, Isaacson established a dedicated photography practice in Chicago, Illinois and Laguna Beach, California. Her work has been exhibited in galleries across the U.S. and internationally. Isaacson is represented at Perspective Gallery in Evanston IL and Alta Vista Arts. Her work is featured in Black + White Photography (UK), SHOTS, NewCity Art and LENSCRATCH. Isaacson was recognized as a 2023 and 2024 Critical Mass Finalist.
-
Sam Jentsch is a Houston based photographer. Sam has an intrinsic interest in the city of Houston and how it is evolving. His current project documents the city and the surrounding areas connected through the bayou system. Particularly the natural environments that exist along the bayou, the communities that have developed alongside it, and the industry that has taken advantage of it. Through documentary landscapes and poetic imagery, this project provides a record of the impact on this ecosystem and the people that live within it.
-
Deborah Jack, is a St. Maarten and Jersey City based multi-disciplinary artist whose work is based in video/sound installation, photography, painting and text. Her work engages a variety of strategies for mining the intersections of histories, cultural memory, ecology and climate change. Her current practice connects the effects of the hurricane storm surge in relation to coastal erosion, the saltwater inundation of intertidal spaces She imagines these rhizomatic, protective intersectional landscapes and wetlands as sites of resistance. This altered landscape, post surge, though temporary, is an exciting conceptual space regarding the intangible memory of water as it intersects with the land and the people who live there.
-
Luisa Dörr is a Brazilian photographer whose work primarily focuses on the feminine human landscape, exploring the complexities of femininity, identity, and human nature. Through the quietness of portraiture, she tells intimate narratives that delve into the layers of her subjects' lives. Her work has been published in National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times, Apple, Airbnb, The Washington Post, among others.
-
“My passion lies in finding often unrecognized moments of everyday life, from the mundane to the humorous. I am fascinated by human interactions and how they relate to their surroundings. These visual narratives of amusement, occasional alarm, and poignant reflection, are everywhere, happening continuously and occur simultaneously. I seek to capture those fleeting moments of humanity, moments that exist and then fade away.”
-
Allison Plass is a Fine Art photographer living in NYC. She received her MA in Art History at UCSB. She completed the Advanced Track Program at ICP in New York in 2020. Her photographic practice is influenced by art history, the natural world, and the intersection of cultural myths and stories we carry about our own lives. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, as the 2023 First Prize winner in the KLPA Portrait Awards, and she is a 2023 LensCulture Portrait Award Finalist. She is the first recipient of the Salon Jane Award for Women in Photography, 2024.
-
Fotohane DARKROOM is a community-based and participatory arts project based in Mardin, Türkiye, mere kilometers from the Syrian border. During our workshops, children from diverse backgrounds – Syrian, Iraqi, Turkish, Kurdish – are encouraged to relate to each other and the world around them through the visual medium of analog photography.
-
Damien is a Vincentian-American photographer whose work explores memory, identity, and legacy through the lens of Black life. Born in Gibraltar and raised between St. Vincent, Brooklyn, and Nashville, he brings a transnational perspective to his images. A biology major at Fisk University and a professional in medical education, Damien came to photography later in life as a self-taught artist. His ongoing project, Saltwater Memory, is a meditation on return—a visual reclamation of homeland through light, gesture, and sea. Rooted in documentary and fine art traditions, his work reflects the emotional tension between belonging, becoming, and remembrance.
-
Jason DeMarte is an artist best known for his large-scale, highly detailed, seductive flora and fauna photo assemblages that explore our cultural relationship to the natural world. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide and held in many private and public collections, including the Denver Art Museum, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Museum of Outdoor Arts, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Saks 5th Avenue Stores, and 21c Museum Hotels. His record of exhibitions includes solo shows at Denver Botanical Gardens, Rule Gallery in Marfa, Texas, Ibis Contemporary in New Orleans, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, the Detroit Center of Contemporary Photography, and the Art Museum of South Texas. DeMarte's work has also been included in prominent group exhibitions, such as; “Context” at Filter Photo Space in Chicago, “The National: Best Contemporary Photography” at the Ft. Wayne Museum of Art, and “Exposure 2021” at the Contemporary Calgary Art Museum, “212 Photography Istanbul”, Museum of Gaziantep, Istanbul, Turkey.
Jason is a tenured professor of art at Eastern Michigan University. He received his B.F.A. in Photography from Colorado State University and his M.F.A in Photography from the University of Oregon.
-
Ziesook You is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores time, nature, and human connection through photography and video. Her early practice focused on experimental video, including personal video diaries, time-compressed self-portraits, and documentaries filmed across the globe that reflect on the passage of time and space.
Since 2016, she has developed Scent of Broq-pa, an ongoing photographic series inspired by the floral traditions of a remote Nepalese village. Using fresh and dried flowers to create lush, symbolic portraits, the project explores the harmony between humans and nature. It has been exhibited in Korea, Hong Kong, the UK, and the United States.
You has exhibited internationally in over ten countries and held 16 solo exhibitions in Korea and the U.S. She earned a master’s degree in fine art and taught contemporary and video art from 2006 to 2014. Based in Austin, Texas, she continues to exhibit across the U.S.
-
Ryan Frigillana (b. Iligan City, Philippines) is a New York-based visual artist working with photography and bookmaking. His recent works engage with personal and communal narratives of the Filipino-American diaspora as they relate to themes of faith, migration, and loss. He explores the book’s fluid potential as a container for these interests, often recontextualizing archives from popular media, family, and biblical sources to activate his own images.
Frigillana is the author of two monographs: Visions of Eden (self-published, 2020) and The Weight of Slumber (Penumbra Foundation, 2021). His publications are held in the library collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Morgan Library and Museum, Getty Research Institute, and the Smithsonian among others. Select awards include the MUUS Collection/Penumbra Foundation Risograph Print & Publication Residency (2021), the NYFA/JGS Fellowship for Photography (2021), the En Foco Photography Fellowship (2023), the Aperture & Google Creator Labs Photo Fund (2023), and the Penumbra Workspace Program (2024). He holds a BFA in Photography and Related Media from the Fashion Institute of Technology (2020).
-
Aimee B. McCrory was born in Houston, Texas. Her work focuses on self-portraiture, feminist themes, the process of aging, and essential familial relationships and their complexities. Her current project is titled Scenes form A Marriage.
-
Marc Ohrem-Leclef (German) is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY.
After completing studies in Communication Design at the Darmstadt University
of Applied Sciences in Germany, he relocated to New York City in 1998.Founding a commercial photography studio that serviced the advertising industry for 15 years, a life-changing experience renewed Ohrem-Leclef's focus on personal long term projects (2012). His collaborative practice moves between documentary and performative modes to construct alternative representations and narratives that address issues of identity and belonging.
A MacDowell Fellow (2018), he teaches at the International Center of Photography (ICP).
-
Christine Elfman is an artist based in Ithaca, New York who explores the inseparability of stillness and change, resolution and ambiguity, intention and the unforeseen. She uses photographic processes in which the subject matter acts as its own medium to make images that slowly shift in meaning and form over time. Many of her photographs are made by fading natural dyes in the sun, and are impossible to fix or resolve. Elfman has had solo exhibitions at Penumbra Foundation (New York), Wasserman Projects (Detroit, MI), Houston Center for Photography (Houston, TX), EUQINOM Gallery (San Francisco), TILT Center for the Contemporary Image (Philadelphia), University of the Arts (Philadelphia), Ithaca College (Ithaca, NY), Gallery Wendi Norris (San Francisco). She is the recipient of a Light Work Grant, and residencies at Constance Saltonstall Foundation and the Cape Cod National Seashore. Her work has been featured in publications including BOMB Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, Photograph Magazine, and Der Greif. She received her BFA from Cornell University and MFA from California College of the Arts. Elfman is represented by EUQINOM Gallery (San Francisco), and currently is Assistant Professor of Photography at Ithaca College.
-
Alejandra Regalado is an artist exploring the intersection of body, memory, and place through photography, video, performance, sculpture, and installation. Her work delves into the complexities of belonging and displacement, influenced by her struggles with chronic pain and sleeplessness. Alejandra examines how the body holds memory and identity, transcending geographic and internal boundaries.
Originally from Mexico City and based in Houston, TX, her practice spans environments across Mexico and the United States. From New York City to the Yucatán Peninsula, she investigates the idea of home as a fluid, embodied experience shaped by movement, resistance, and transformation.
Her work has been exhibited at the National Museum of Mexican Art, CUE Art Foundation, Houston Center for Photography, and Galería de la Raza. Alejandra was selected for the 2024 Texas Biennial and the 2022 New York Latin American Art Triennial and has received multiple grants and awards recognizing her interdisciplinary practice.
-
Jessica Hays is a photographer, artist, and educator based in Montana and Chicago. Grounded in the American west, her work explores the long lasting effects of the land on human psyche from trauma to restoration. Hays works in a variety of processes including pigment printing, handmade books, video, and alternative process. Her work is shown internationally, received numerous awards, published in magazines and textbooks, and is held in multiple public and private collections. Hays earned her MFA in Photography from Columbia College, a BA in Film and Photography, and a BA in Environmental Studies at Montana State.
-
Carlos Ocando is a Venezuelan-American photographer that specializes in the natural landscapes, the urban landscape, the urban abstraction and liminal spaces. Exploring his surroundings looking for answers for questions from within, trying to find meaning in a new life, in a new country where there are no roots and a whole lot of uncertainty.
-
Christopher Lowell investigates themes of nostalgia, utopia/dystopia and autobiography in his work, shooting on film and using traditional printing practices to convey the most “honest” interpretation of his photographs. He has had numerous exhibitions throughout the US, including solo shows at Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta, Photo LA, and the Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles. His work is included in the Sovereign Collection and the Elton John Collection among others, and has been featured in several publications including Interview Magazine, Glamour, and Vanity Fair. He studied photography at the University of Southern California and the New School for Design.
-
Granville Carroll is a visual artist and photographer examining metaphysical spirituality. His work unravels the multifaceted dimensions of reality, asking us to ponder what exists beyond the physical. He questions the constructs of racial Blackness and expands the conversation to incorporate temporal, spatial, and spiritual blackness. Through self-portraiture, landscape, and photo manipulation, Carroll creates new realities and states of being. He explores the boundless potential of the imagination, drawing inspiration from science, science fiction, poetry, philosophy, and Afrofuturism. Through various visual strategies, he investigates selfhood, identity, representation, and abstraction.
-
My name is Keith Belzner I am an amateur astrophotographer based in Maryland since 2020. What began as a casual interest in photography quickly evolved into a deep fascination with astronomy and the night sky. Blending art and science, I enjoy capturing the beauty of space through my lens, sharing my passion with both the astrophotography and local photography communities.
I am an active member of the Harford County Astronomical Society and the Harford County Photography Group. My work has earned recognition in regional photo contests and is featured in a local gallery. -
Shaina Nasrin Nyman is a photographer, filmmaker, visual artist and educator working in Philadelphia, PA. They hold a BFA from The University of the Arts and are currently pursuing their MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Nyman’s work has been included in exhibitions in Philadelphia, PA; Washington, D.C.; Houston, TX; and Atlanta, GA, among others. Their work has been funded by the Penn Treaty Special Services District. Recently, they were awarded a fellowship to attend Penland School of Craft’s Winter Residency Program in January 2025. Nyman is a member of Batikh Collective, a pop-up cinema and gallery in Philadelphia that centers SWANA (Southwest Asian North African) women and queer artists. They currently work as a Photography Lab Technician at Haverford College, where they manage the photography facilities and instruct workshops on the craft of digital and analog photography.
-
Linda Plaisted is an American multi-disciplinary artist working in photography, collage, painting and mixed media. Her work has been exhibited extensively around the world and featured in publications such as Lenscratch, Shots Magazine, Black and White Photography Magazine UK, Artdoc Magazine and Phototrouvee Magazine. She is a 2025 Klompching Fresh Finalist, 2025 Rhonda Wilson Award Shortlist, 2025 Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 Finalist, 2024 and 2023 Critical Mass Top 200, and winner of the Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women Photographers. Her multi-layered narrative work champions the stories of Women and Mother Earth; two critically endangered species.
-
Emma Ressel (born Bar Harbor, ME) is an artist working with large format film photography, re-photography, and archives. Her current work researches natural history collections to examine how we describe nature to ourselves over vast timescales.
Ressel earned her BA in Photography at Bard College and her MFA at the University of New Mexico. She has exhibited solo shows at The New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque, NM and Strata Gallery in Santa Fe, NM. Her work is in permanent collections at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
Ressel was on the shortlist for the 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize, and in 2022 she won the Film Photo Student Award. Her first photobook, Olives in the street, was published by Edizione del bradipo in 2017, and she has since self-published 2 additional photobooks, Glass Eyes Stare Back (2024), and Extant Erosions (2025).
Ressel is currently a Post-Doc fellow at the Center for Regional Studies at University of New Mexico and she is the cofounder of the photobook collective Printer Jam with collaborators Kenton Bueche and Meggan Gould. She lives and works in Albuquerque, NM.
-
Katie Kehoe is a multidisciplinary artist who creates speculative survival architecture and wearables to use in performance and installation she documents with still photography. Her work has been presented across the US and Canada, highlights include: The Hirshhorn Museum (DC), The Contemporary Museum (MD), Center for Maine Contemporary Art (ME), and Mother Earth Exhibition (DC). In May 2023, she attended Santa Fe Art Institute’s, International Artist Residency, Changing Climate. Kehoe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at Florida State University and completed her MFA at the Mount Royal School of Art at Maryland Institute College of Art.
-
Jamie Robertson (B. 1988 American) is a visual artist and educator working in photography and video. Born and raised in Houston, her Texas roots inform her practice as she explores the environmental history of the South and its relationship to Blackness.
Robertson has exhibited her work nationally and internationally in numerous group and solo exhibitions at institutions such as Vermont Center for Photography, Brattleboro, VT; SF Camerawork, San Francisco, CA; Galveston Arts Center, Galveston, TX; Alabama Contemporary Art Center, Mobile, AL, and Exposure Photography Festival in Alberta, Canada. She has received multiple grants and fellowships, most recently through The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and the Elizabeth River Project. Her work has been featured in Glasstire, Flat Files, and Fraction Magazine. Robertson has published two photographic books, Charting the Afriscape of Leon County, Texas, and alligatorwatergreen with Fifth Wheel Press and National Monument Press, respectively. Her work is held in both public and private collections.
Jamie earned an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Houston and an MS in Art Therapy from Florida State University. Robertson is an Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University and works between Texas and Virginia. Currently, her research explores the Great Dismal Swamp and its connection to maroonage in the Southern United States.
-
Adam Ekberg earned his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions include George Eastman Museum, Rochester, and CLAMP, New York. Recent group exhibitions include Aperture, New York, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME, and Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA.
Ekberg has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Hewnoaks, Monson Arts, Monhegan Artists' Residency and Playa. He is the recipient of both the Society for Photographic Education’s Imagemaker Award and the Tanne Foundation Award.
His work is in the collections of the George Eastman Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Worcester Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.
When not making art, Ekberg can be found on long-distance solo bicycle trips, swimming in any body of water that will have him, teaching photography, and playing Go.
-
Thomas Jackson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. After earning a B.A. in History from the College of Wooster, he spent his early career in New York working first in book publishing, then as an editor and writer at Forbes Life magazine. An interest in photography books eventually led him to pick up a camera, shooting Garry Winogrand-inspired street scenes, then landscapes, and finally the installation work he does today. Largely self-taught as an artist, Jackson’s practice merges landscape photography, sculpture and installation art. His work has been exhibited widely, including at The Brooks Museum in Memphis, Tennessee and the Bolinas Museum in Bolinas, CA, and has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Wired, the San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere. Jackson was named one of the Critical Mass Top 50 in 2012, won the “installation/still-life” category of PDN’s The Curator award in 2013 and earned second place in CENTER's Curator's Choice Award in 2014.
-
Brad Carlile is a photographer that lives in Portland Oregon. He has exhibited his work in three biennials and is in the collections of several international museums. Brad's work has been shown in 10 countries and has had 71 shows. His solo show in Portland Oregon was chosen as best photography show in 2011. He has won over 29 photographic awards. In 2009, he was chosen as a winner in the prestigious Hearst 8x10 Photography Biennial. Brad’s work has been featured in The Houston Chronicle, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Las Vegas, The Oregonian, Huffington Post, and SPE.
-
Jonas Yip is a fine art photographer and musician based in the Los Angeles area. Born in Princeton, New Jersey to a poet-writer-professor father and an art historian mother, Jonas was raised in a creative environment steeped in art and music, poetry and performance, design and architecture, and plenty of world travel. Yet somehow Jonas decided to become an engineer, building a successful career in Silicon Valley startup companies. Over the years, however, he never stopped pursuing his creative passions: music, design, and photography. Jonas has since left the high-tech world to concentrate exclusively on these smaller, more personal projects.
-
Wen-Hang Lin, a Taiwan-born photographer, ventured to America, inspired by Robert Frank's "The Americans," to explore art. Despite limited artistic support in Taiwan, Lin began his journey 30 years ago, studying at Arizona State University and earning an M.F.A. from The Ohio State University. Now based in Mesa, Arizona, Lin is a graphic designer and photographer. His art, including the double-exposure negatives of “The Riff of Silence” and the blending figures in “And I Wander,” merges realism with abstraction to explore themes of memory, identity, time, and place, connecting the tangible with personal perception.
