"Inside/Outside: Work by Texas Women Photographers"

Flying Lessons by Cathy Spence

"Inside/Outside" is an important exhibit for Women & Their Work -- it is a stamp not only of the gallery's maturity but also its continuing relevance. Curated by Galveston Arts Center's Clint Willour and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's Anne Tucker, the 10-photographer survey finds established Texas artists alongside newcomers, such as 24-year-old Dallas photographer Misty Keasler, whose portraits of orphanages in Romania, Russia, and India are startling but never bleak. Each environment seems tweaked with some beauty -- in Free Tibet Bedroom, a light bulb spreads across the turquoise wall like a setting sun; in Marsha and Her Best Friend, hectic Oriental rugs hang behind the two pale, blank-faced schoolgirls clutching hands on the couch. My favorite series in the exhibit is Cathy Spence's precocious, often macabre photos of children. Once an assistant to Keith Carter, Spence applies her mentor's fine technique and sense of humor to her portraits (which showed last fall at the Stephen L. Clark Gallery). A shirtless boy with feathers taped along his arm (Flying Lessons), a little girl with talons on her fingers (Goblin), images of blindfolds and skeleton suits, shadows and sleep -- Spence's distressed black-and-whites speak of magic and make-believe, of the infinite possibility of childhood.

From "The Bird People" by Sharon Seligman

Kathy Vargas' hand-colored black-and-whites achieve a similar quality of otherworldliness, but Vargas is exploring not fantasy but her own history, rephotographing her family archives for a series that captures the strange and hazy hues of memory. Sharon Seligman's series "The Bird People," on the other hand, has the immediacy of documentary photography. Seligman spent four years shooting roadside animal sellers in Mexico, and her camera captures stark images -- a ragged baby owl with an almost accusatory stare, a woman dangling a rat on a string, two giggling toddlers crouched in the rubble beside a lonesome highway. Laura Wilson's series on the Hutterites of Montana also offer some unforgettable images, such as the side-by-side black-and-white portraits of Anne Marie Walter and her daughter: plain-faced beauties, wide-eyed and hale, indistinguishable save for the elder's slightly sagging skin, the lines on her cheeks and forehead. It is a poetic representation of new and older generations working in step with one another, the future and the past side by side, exactly what this exhibit displays so well.