Discoveries of the Meeting Place

About the artists

Marina Black grew up in Moscow, where she studied history and painting, before moving to Canada, which is when art became her primary preoccupation. Themes central to Black’s work, whether in photography, drawing, or writing, are mortality and anguish, beauty and the abjectness of the human body, and identity and memory. She is interested in the emotional truth in people’s lives, seeking to reveal what their existence is like underneath the surface. She is intrigued by the idea that when words disappear, the body’s presence continues to be felt through spacing, punctuation, and light.

Black’s photography is about experimentation and the physical process of reworking the surface. She uses analog, digital, and cameraless technologies, and likes the tactile qualities of prints and dealing with fragments, observing that they often take her to a new place.

Black received the W. Lawrence Heisey Graduate Award for outstanding achievement in creative and scholarly work from York University, as well as several Ontario Arts Council grants. She was a featured exhibitor at the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, Greater Toronto. Her work has been published in Eyemazing Susan, vol. II (Amsterdam: Eyemazing Editions, 2015), curated by Susan Zadeh; Fossils of Light + Time (2015), curated by Elizabeth Avedon, an editor of L’Oeil de la Photographie; and burn (2010), curated by David Alan Harvey, a Magnum photographer. Black’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions worldwide and reviewed in numerous fine art publications. Her photographs are included in the collections of Museo del Patrimonio Municipal, Malaga, Spain; Alliances Francaises in Canada; and Foundation IZOLYATSIA, Ukraine.

Jinhyun Cha is an artist working in documentary photography, using it to explore Korea’s modern and contemporary history and the nature of the postwar division of the country into South and North Korea. His first project, The Portraits of 108 (2007-2008), takes as its subject the group of Korean women forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. With this work, he won the first Sangsangmadang Korean Photographer’s Fellowship, a program sponsored by KT&G, in 2008, as well as the Asian Pioneer Photographer Award at the 6th Dali International Photography Exhibition held in Dali City, China, in 2015.

In his ongoing series Post-Border Line, Cha is working on a reinterpretation of the significance of the division that came after the Korean War, seen in the current context. The war of ideologies that took so many people’s lives in the early 1950s, and the irony and black comedy that popped out so casually in the aftermath of this “drawing of borders,” provide the context for what he is trying to visualize in a serious way. He wants his works to create a space in which viewers might realize the mistakes and errors that have been made, reflect on them, acknowledge them, and seek to right the wrongs. His practice allows entry to “the unfamiliar history that [we mistakenly think] we are familiar with.”

Born in 1973, Cha earned an M.F.A. degree in photography from Kyung-sung University and completed his doctoral course at Hongik University. He lives and works in South Korea.

Yukari Chikura was born in Tokyo, Japan. After graduating with a university degree in music, she began creating work as a music composer, computer programmer, designer, and photographer. Yukari’s work fluorite fantasia was one of the winners of the Steidl Book Award in 2016, and it will be published as part of a boxed volume, titled 8 Books for Asia, by Steidl Verlag, Gottingen, Germany.

She was recognized as one of fifty winners of the LensCulture Emerging Talent Awards in 2016 and was named one of the Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 in both 2015 and 2016. She has also been a recipient of an International Photography Award from IPA, Sony World Photography Award, PX3 award, recognition at Photo Basel, recognition from National Geographic, an All About Photo Award, and a Tokyo International Foto Award, among others. She was selected as the IPA Best of Show Photographer in 2013 and as one of the Top 15 Emerging and Established Asian Photographers by IPA (Lucie Foundation) in 2016.

Yukari has had solo exhibitions of her photography and multimedia art at twelve venues in Japan and has had her work included in group exhibitions in numerous museums and galleries around the world. She participated in the portfolio review Review Santa Fe 2014, in an Eddie Adams Workshop selected on the merit of her portfolio in 2014, and in a RPS (Royal Photographic Society) Photobook Masterclass in 2015. She was the Artist in Residence at the Mt. Rokko International Photo Festival 2015. She also lectured at Tokyo Zokei University in 2013, 2016, and 2017. Yukari’s photographs have been published in the New York Times, TIME magazine, Vice magazine, Wallpaper* magazine, Fraction magazine online, and other journals. Some of her projects are in the collections of the Griffin Photography Museum, Winchester, Massachusetts, and the Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris, while the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts (K*MoPA) in Hokuto, Japan, is currently planning an acquisition.

Debi Cornwall is a conceptual documentary artist who returned to photography in 2014 after a twelve-year career as a civil rights lawyer. She studied photography at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) while attending Brown University, where she earned a B.A. in 1995, and she went on to receive her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2000. Her visual work interrogates American state power in the post-9/11 era, marrying empathy and dark humor with a critique of the system. Relying on exhaustive research and negotiating for access to prohibited sites and reticent subjects, Cornwall layers meaning into her work by juxtaposing unexpected images in ways that disrupt assumptions and provoke inquiry.

For her first project, a vivid and disorienting look at Guantanamo Bay and its global diaspora, she was nominated for the Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer, won the Award for Women Documentarians from Duke University’s Archive of Documentary Arts Collection, and was invited to speak at the United Nations. The series has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Centre de la Photographie Geneve, Switzerland; the Lianzhou FotoFestival in China, where it won the Punctum Award; the BMW Photo Space of the GoEun Museum of Photography, Busan, South Korea; and the Steven Kasher Gallery, New York, New York.

Cornwall is a 2017-19 Fellow at the Center for Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. Her recent book, Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay (Santa Fe, N.M.: Radius Books, 2017), was shortlisted for the 2017 First PhotoBook Award from the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation and the 2017 Photo-Text Book Award from Les Rencontres d’Arles.

Based in San Francisco, California, Kirk Crippens and Gretchen LeMaistre have worked on collaborative projects and individual works for over a decade. Their projects begin with curiosity about a social tension, trend, or peculiarity, which then propels them into further research about both the subject and the photographic processes relevant to addressing it. They engage photographic tradition in a dialogue about the topics they explore and about the medium of photography in contemporary culture.

For Live Burls, Crippens and LeMaistre explored the link between photographic history and environmental conservation, which began with the pioneering work by early masters such as Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge, whose photographs of coastal forests and the logging industry influenced the establishment of the National Park System in the United States. Working with an 8x10 camera, they coordinated with rangers of the Redwood National and State Parks in northern California to locate and photograph poached redwood trees in changing lights and seasons.

Prints from the Live Burls series are held in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and RayKo Photo Center, San Francisco, California. In 2016 and 2017, Live Burls was exhibited at the Candela Books + Gallery, Richmond, Virginia; Datz Museum of Art, Gwangju, South Korea; and “Horizonte Zingst” Environmental Photography Festival, Germany. Live Burls: Poaching the Redwoods was published by Schilt Publishing in Amsterdam in 2017.

Crippens has exhibited his work in the National Portrait Gallery, London, England; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; and National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland. LeMaistre has exhibited her work in San Francisco, California, at the SFMOMA Artists Gallery, Southern Exposure, and Fouladi Projects.

David Fathi is a French artist, born in 1985, who lives and works in Paris. After completing a master’s degree in mathematics and computer science, Fathi started to practice artistic research alongside his career in engineering. This double practice has shaped his work method, which is research-focused and centered on the visual reconstruction of strange and little-known anecdotes.

In his work, Fathi revisits a parallel history of science and politics. His depictions of a world occupied by lost atomic bombs, cursed scientists, and an immortal woman invite us to question our cognitive biases.

Fathi’s work has been exhibited throughout the world, at festivals including Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2017); Fotofestiwal, International Festival of Photography, Lodz, Poland (2016); and the FotoFest Biennial, Houston, Texas (2018).

Thomas Holton received his M.F.A. from The School of Visual Arts in 2005. His work has been exhibited widely, including at venues in New York, New York, such as the New York Public Library, The Museum of the City of New York, and Sasha Wolf Gallery, as well as at the China-Lishui International Photography Festival. In 2005 he was one of twenty-four photographers chosen to show their work at the Art + Commerce Festival of Emerging Photographers in Brooklyn, New York, and in 2006 American Photo magazine named him one of the Ten Best Young Photographers in the United States. Additionally, images from his series The Lams of Ludlow Street were featured in Aperture (2007), published three times by The New York Times (2008, 2012, and 2016), and appeared in numerous other magazines, newspapers, and websites. Kehrer Verlag in Heidelberg, Germany, published his monograph, The Lams of Ludlow Street, in 2016. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and family.

Priya Kambli was born in India. She moved to the United States at the age of eighteen, carrying her entire life in one suitcase. She began her artistic career in the United States, and her work has always been informed by this experience as an immigrant. She completed her B.F.A. degree in graphic design from the University of Louisiana in Lafayette and went on to receive an M.F.A. degree in photography from the University of Houston. She is currently a professor of art at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri. In 2008 PhotoLucida awarded her a book publication prize for her project Color Falls Down, which was published in 2010.

Elaine Ling (1946-2016) was an exuberant adventurer, traveler, and photographer who was most at home backpacking her view camera across the great deserts of the world and sleeping under the stars. Born in Hong Kong, Ling had lived in Canada since the age of nine. Upon her arrival in Canada, Ling was exhilarated by the freedom of spacious landscapes, which formed the basis for her attraction to stone and places of nature. She studied the piano, and the cello, and pursued a career in medicine. After receiving her medical degree from the University of Toronto, she has practiced family medicine among various First Nations peoples in Canada’s North and Pacific Northwest regions, as well as on the other side of the world, in Abu Dhabi and Nepal.

Seeking the solitude of deserts and the abandoned architectures of ancient cultures, Ling explored the shifting equilibrium between nature and man-made forms across four continents. In her photographs of the deserts of Mongolia, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Timbuktu, Namibia, North Africa, India, South America, Australia, and the American Southwest; the citadels of Ethiopian cities, San Agustin, Persepolis, Petra, Cappadocia, Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat, Great Zimbabwe, and Abu Simbel; and the Buddhist centers of Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Tibet, and Bhutan, she captured that dialogue.

 Elaine Ling lost her battle with cancer in 2016, the majority of her archive now rests with the University of Toronto.

Dylan Vitone is a photographer based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He holds a B.A. from St. Edward’s University and an M.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art. He is currently an associate professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. His photographs have been exhibited widely and collected by a number of museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), Chicago, Illinois; Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Tennessee; Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas; Polaroid Collection; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. His photographic projects are based around a specific geographical location, which he uses to speak about greater social and cultural phenomenon.

About the artists
Regina Agu was born in Houston, TX. She lives and works in Chicago, IL, and her practice is deeply rooted in the Gulf South. Her work has been included in exhibitions, public readings, publications, and performances internationally. Her first solo museum installation, Passage, was presented at the New Orleans Museum of Art (2019-2020). Agu was awarded a Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts + Project Row Houses fellowship at the University of Houston for her research on Emancipation Park, and a residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans through a partnership with For Freedoms. Agu received a 2017 Artadia Houston award and was a 2016-2017 Open Sessions participant at The Drawing Center in NYC. From 2014-2017, Agu was the co-director of Alabama Song, a collaboratively-run art space in Third Ward, Houston, which received a 2016 SEED grant from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Agu is the founder of the Houston-based WOC Reading Group, and her other collaborative projects include Friends of Angela Davis Park and the Houston-based independent small press paratext.

Travis Boyer (born 1979, Fort Worth, Texas) received his MFA from Bard College in 2012. Boyer’s practice employs a range of media and methods: from painting, textile, sculpture, cyanotypes and video, to idiosyncratic collaborative projects. While diverse in form, this body of work is fundamentally grounded in performance. By drawing structure from familiar contexts (such as craft workshops, drinking games, and group fitness), Boyerʼs performative works dissolve the barriers separating the private and the public, the intimate and the unknown. Boyer has exhibited internationally at museums and institutions including The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The New Museum, New York; Kunstverein, Amsterdam; The Goethe Institut, New York; High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree, California, SOMA Arts, San Francisco; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Participant Inc., New York; Dumbo Arts Center, New York; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, as well as Galleria Glance, Torinoand Piso 51, Mexico City, among others. He was among the first artists awarded the Fire Island Artist Residency. Boyer has been invited as guest lecturer and performer at Yale University's MFA program, California College of the Arts, Oakland and Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Boyer lives and works in New York City.

Tay Butler is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Houston, TX, while teaching and studying in Fayetteville, AR. Currently an MFA candidate of the University of Arkansas’ Photography and Studio Art program, he received his BFA in Photography and Digital Media from the University of Houston. Tay's work utilizes photography, collage, video, music, installation and performance to identify and confront history, migration, memory and identity. He begins with literature, folklore, national and local media, ephemera and historical documents. This content is then digitized, photographed, cut, clipped, extended, collaged, shrunk, enlarged, exposed, uncovered, repeated or redacted and placed into a new context. Constructing revisionist histories that are fictional but true, authentic yet imagined, the stories and scenes created act like braids and weave together a rich tapestry that can last longer than human memory. 

Stephanie Concepcion Ramirez is a Salvadoran-American artist from Prince George's County, Maryland. She has had the privilege to attain her BFA at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA and her MFA at the University of Texas at Austin. Ramirez’ practice combines the language of photography with site-specific installations and text. Her work is based on notions of memory, personal and historical amnesia that trace the veins of the Central American diaspora. In an attempt to reconcile with her personal and cultural histories and memories, she creates work to validate truth, false memories, filtered history and fantasy. Ramirez currently works and lives in Pearland, Texas.

Ja’Tovia Gary is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation. Gary is concerned with re-memory and employs a rigorous interrogation and reapprehension of the archive in much of her work. The artist seeks to trouble notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity, and applies what scholar and cultural critic bell hooks terms “an oppositional gaze” as both maker and critical spectator of moving image works. Intimate, often personal, and politically charged, her works aim to unmask power and its influence on how we perceive and formulate reality. Gary’s films and installations serve as reparative gestures for the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed. Black sociality, familial bonds, the interiority of Black women and femmes, and the global efforts towards liberation often pull focus in Gary’s multivalent works. 

Ryan Hawk is a visual artist using video, sculpture, and site-specific installation to imagine alternative corporealities and forms of embodiment. Hawk has presented solo exhibitions at Gray Contemporary, Lawndale Art Center, The Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum, and The Museum of Human Achievement. His work has also been included in group exhibitions, screenings, and festivals such as Perform Chinatown, Los Angeles; Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn; the Museum of Fine Arts in Nagoya, Japan; Jonathan Hopson Gallery, Houston; and many more. Notable awards include an SMFA Traveling Fellowship, The Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund from the Dallas Museum of Art, and a two-year fellowship with the Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Hawk holds a BFA in studio art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an MFA in studio art from the University of Texas at Austin.

Autumn Knight is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video and text. Her performance work has been on view at various institutions including DiverseWorks Artspace, Art League Houston, Project Row Houses, Blaffer Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, Skowhegan Space (NY), The New Museum, The Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Optica (Montreal, Canada), The Poetry Project (NY) and Krannart Art Museum (IL), The Institute for Contemporary Art (VCU), Human Resources Los Angeles (HRLA) and Akademie der Kunste, (Berlin). Knight has been an artist in residence with with In-Situ (UK), Galveston Artist Residency, YICA (Yamaguchi, Japan), Artpace (San Antonio, TX) and a 2016-2017 artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem (NY). Knight is the winner of a 2021-2022 Rome Prize and the recipient of an Artadia Award (2015) and an Art Matters Grant (2018). She has served as visiting artist at Montclair State University, Princeton University and Bard College. Her performance work is held in the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016) and holds an M.A. in Drama Therapy from New York University.

Baseera Khan was born in Denton, Texas and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Selected solo and two-person exhibitions include: Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio (2022, forthcoming); Moody Center For The Arts, Rice University, Houston, Texas (2022, forthcoming); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2021, forthcoming); Public Art Fund, New York (2021, forthcoming); Atlanta Contemporary (2020); The Kitchen, New York (2020); Simone Subal Gallery, New York (2019); Jenkins Johnson, New York (2019); Colorado Springs Fine Art Centers (2018); Texas Christian University College of Fine Arts, Fort Worth, Texas (2017); Participant Inc., New York (2017). Baseera Khan has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships including UOVO Prize (2020); BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize (2019); Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019); and Art Matters (2018). Artist residencies include: LUX Art Institute, California (2021); Pioneer Works, New York (2018); AIRspace, Abrons Art Center, New York (2016); and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Program, Maine (2014). Baseera Khan’s work is part of the following public collections: Kadist, Paris and San Francisco; Providence College, Providence, RI; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.

Annette Lawrence’s work has been widely exhibited and is held in museums, and private collections including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Dallas Museum of Art; The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas; ArtPace Center for Contemporary Art, Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, American Airlines and the Art Collection of the Dallas Cowboys. She received a 2018 MacDowell Fellowship, the 2015 Moss/Chumley Award from the Meadows Museum, and the 2009 Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Award from the Dallas Museum of Art. Her work was included in the 1997 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. She is an alumnus of the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Skowhegan School. She received a BFA from The Hartford Art School and an MFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art. Originally from New York, Lawrence lives and works in Denton, Texas and is a Professor of Studio Art in the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas. In May 2021, the Texas Commission on the Arts (TCA) announced the Texas State Legislature’s 2021 and 2022 appointment of Annette Lawrence as State Artist of the year, Visual Artist, 2D.

Adam Marnie (b. 1977, Minneapolis, MN, lives and works in Houston, Texas). Recent exhibitions of his work include: New Constructions, Bad Reputation, Los Angeles, Dragon Polishes the Pearl, Arturo Bandini, Los Angeles, and Construction/ Destruction, Galerie Almine Rech, Paris. He is publisher and editor-in-chief of F Magazine, a biannual self-published art magazine based in Los Angeles, Houston, and New York, a project around which he has organized group exhibitions such as The Garden of Forking Paths at Magenta Plains, New York.

Aura Rosenberg received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA from Hunter College, NY as well as attending the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. Rosenberg’s work probes sexuality, gender, childhood, artistic identity and historical construction. Her diverse practice draws on photography, video, painting, sculpture, installation and performance. Rosenberg’s work has been exhibited at, among others, the Kiev Biennale, the Berlin Biennale, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Lehnbachhaus, Munich, Le Magasin / Centre D’art Contemporain, Grenoble, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Institute of Contemporary Art / ICA, Philadelphia, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Hamburger Banhof, Berlin, MAMCO / Musee d'art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, The Swiss Institute, New York; The Sculpture Center, Long Island City, JOAN, Los Angeles and Galeria Studio, Warsaw. Recently her work has been featured in the exhibitions Ecstasy at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart which travelled to the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland, Straying From The Line, Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin, Face It! In the Soliloquy With The Other at the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, Germany and Up To And Including Limits at the Muzeum Susch, Zernez, Switzerland. Rosenberg lives in New York City and Berlin. She is represented by Meliksetian | Briggs in Los Angeles and Martos Gallery in New York City and teaches at Pratt Institute and The School of Visual Arts, New York.

Kara Springer is particularly concerned with armature—the underlying structure that holds the flesh of a body in place. She works with photography, sculpture, and site-specific interventions to explore systems of structural support through engagement with architecture, urban infrastructure, and systems of institutional and political power. Springer holds degrees from the University of Toronto, ENSCI les Ateliers in Paris, and the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Her work has been exhibited at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of the Bahamas, the National Gallery of Jamaica, and the Frankfurt Museum of Applied Arts. She is an alum of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art and currently holds a fellowship with the Museum of Fine Arts Houston Core Program. 

About the Texas Biennial
Produced by Big Medium, the Texas Biennial is a geographically-led, independent survey of contemporary art in Texas. The 2021 Texas Biennial: A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon is the seventh iteration of the program, making the Texas Biennial the longest-running state biennial in the country. The program was founded in 2005 by Austin nonprofit Big Medium to provide an exhibition opportunity open to all artists living and working in the state. Since its inception, the Texas Biennial has brought the work of over 300 artists to new audiences, springboarding many artists’ careers and underscoring the diversity of contemporary practice in Texas. The 2021 Texas Biennial is curated by Ryan N. Dennis and Evan Garza, and produced in partnership with Fotofest, Artpace, Ruby City, the McNay Art Museum, and the San Antonio Museum of Art. To learn more, visit texasbiennial.org.

About FotoFest
FotoFest, a platform for art and ideas, presents the first and longest-running international Biennial of photography and new media art in the United States. A cultural non-profit organization based in Houston, Texas, FotoFest organizes year-round exhibitions and a classroom-based learning program, Literacy Through Photography that uses photography as a tool to strengthen student writing and learning skills. Co-Founded by photojournalists Frederick Baldwin and Wendy Watriss in Houston, in 1983, FotoFest promotes international awareness of museum-quality photographic and new media art from around the world. As an international platform for photographic and contemporary art, the FotoFest has become known as a showcase for the discovery and presentation of important new work and talent from around the world. The Biennial takes place citywide in Houston with participation from leading art museums, art galleries, nonprofit art spaces, universities, and civic spaces. 

About Big Medium
Big Medium is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting artists and building community through the arts in Austin and across Texas. We provide opportunities for artists to create, exhibit, and discuss their work and connect to an engaged and diverse audience. We strive to make art a part of everyday life. To learn more, visit bigmedium.org.