Stephanie Bursese
strike-through
May 29 to June 22, 2025
© Stephanie Bursese
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 29, 2025 from 6 - 8 PM
strike-through is a site-specific installation featuring risographs, photography, and hand-made textile pieces created in response to practices in language and imagery around editing, copying, redaction, and “the back”. This exhibition will feature new work from the past three months that Bursese has created as an artist-in-residence at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and the Houston Center for Photography.
“‘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, 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.”
© Stephanie BurseseAbout the Artist: Stephanie Bursese
Stephanie Bursese (b.1980, Schenectady, New York) is a Philadelphia-based multidisciplinary visual artist, educator, and designer who has spent her life along the East Coast, deeply embedded in many creative communities. She creates visual relationships between physical and psychological space through repetitive processes using printed images, textiles, site-specific installations, book forms, sculpture, architectural elements, and other meticulously handmade objects.
Her work has appeared in numerous group and solo exhibitions, publications, and museums nationally and internationally, including: The Aperture Foundation, The Print Center, Expo Chicago, Cornell University, Vox Populi, Galerie Maison Kasini, Everson Museum of Art, Silver Eye Center for Photography, The University of Virginia, 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 in 2013, Razor Thin Rock Hard, released a second book in 2015, Belt and Brace, and was nominated for the MACK First Book Award in 2017.
Alongside her artistic work, she has held roles as a collaborator, strategist, designer, director, organizer, and project manager for numerous national and local foundations, institutions, funders, and organizations. She has taught in higher education for the last 20 years and has extensive experience working within and around academic systems. She served as Program Manager for the Philadelphia Area Creative Collaboratives initiative, a $750K Mellon Foundation grant project (2017-2020), and as a Co-Director & Curator of the Pew-funded project Teaching at the End of Times (2022-2024). In 2024, Bursese concluded her 12-year artist membership at Vox Populi Gallery and artist collective. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Florida in Photography and Art History and received a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from Syracuse University. Bursese lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.
Questions?
For questions about this exhibition, please contact Exhibitions
Exhibitions and Programs Coordinator, exhibits@hcponline.org or 713-529-4755, ext 106.