Ciara Bryant, Julie Devries and Sebastien Boncy

Ciara Elle Bryant is an interdisciplinary artist working with photography, new media, video and installations. Bryant chooses to discuss Black culture and Blackness by focusing on how identity and heritage exist in the new millennium. Bryant approaches this task through her research practice, which is integral to her process of furthering conversations surrounding Black culture in art as well as historical studies. Bryant has exhibited installations with the Nasher Sculpture Center, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Women and Their Work The MAC, SXSW, The Houston Museum of African American Culture and Talley Dunn Gallery. Bryant is currently residing in Dallas, and holds a Masters of Fine Art from Southern Methodist University.

“...She is a witness and a guide...”
- Carrie Mae Weems

Artist Statement

"I am the camera and subject, always. When you think about self-portraiture it seems to be rooted in ego, but for many it is the nurturing of a trauma. The artist has to continually grapple with self during the most agonizing times. To Witness | To Guide is an iteration of what self reflection feels like during a season of healing and expansion."

Julie Devries and Sebastien Boncy

Julie DeVries: Working in painting, sculpture and digital media, Julie DeVries mines poignant memories and observations of nature in the urban and suburban environment which illustrate our impact on the natural world and the effects of green spaces on our emotional well-being. She was born and raised in Houston and still lives and works there with her husband, photographer Sebastien Boncy, and their daughter Louise. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago focusing on painting and Latin American art history and spent a semester studying abroad with family in Argentina. She then received her MFA in painting and drawing from the University of Houston and serves as a Visual Arts faculty member at Lone Star College North Harris. Her work has been exhibited and collected locally and nationally and has been included in the prestigious Houston Endowment permanent collection. Her most current solo exhibition at Hunter Dunbar Projects Gallery in New York was also reviewed in the September issue of The Brooklyn Rail. Recently, she has been working on animating her digital drawings in order to create time based vignettes of distilled moments and has been designing and installing her imagery as larger scale immersive paintings, sculptures and vinyl wall murals.

Sebastien Boncy, born in Haiti and shipwrecked in Texas, is all six members of the Pugilist Press collective. In the last decade, he’s maintained a hyperlocal practice centered around an online photographic archive of the city: Purple Time Space Swamp. His photographs have been exhibited at Art League Houston, Visible Records, The Mystic Lyon, Galveston Art Center, among others. His reviews and essays have been published by Glasstire, Not That But This, Sugar and Rice, Found Me Mag, Art + Culture, Flat Files, Common Field, Fotodok, and Fototazo.