Curatorial Projects
Zan currently serves as Assistant Director at Koslov Larsen (formerly Foto Relevance), a gallery space exhibiting contemporary art with an emphasis on photography-based work. While at Rice University, Zan served as the Director of Inferno Gallery (formerly Matchbox), Rice’s student-run art gallery. Under their directorship, the gallery exhibited shows from local Houston and Texas-based artists as well as from students in Rice’s arts department.
Object Impermanence
January 10 - February 28, 2025
Featuring the works of Rosalba Breazeale, Julián Chams, and Amber Toplisek, Object Impermanence explores the art object as artifact, a tool for time-traveling, reaching back into the past and sustaining into the future. An artifact serves as a physical mark of the maker having existed in time, a testament to the perseverance of their legacy. What do we choose to preserve as part of our lineage?
The exhibition brings together photosculptural works which defy the bounds of the traditional photographic frame. The pieces feature natural imagery in fragmented and refracted forms—these incomplete forms synthesize to become something larger than themselves, a form of collectivism. Each artifact, crafted by the hand of the artist, holds personal memory as well as collective memory.
Image: Julián Chams, Colección #4 (Palma, El Yunque), 2023
The Body as Memory
January 15 - March 19, 2022
The Body as Memory is a group exhibition that brings together the work of three artists — Caleb Cole, Nick Simko, and Gabriel García Román — who each work with concepts of identity and queerness, both reaching into the past and looking toward the future. The show investigates the ways in which the body interacts with the environment around it—the cultures it is born into, how it is viewed, how it views itself within that context, and how it imagines itself. It recognizes the queer body as a historical site of injustice, yet, through acceptance, presents the body as a site of exultation (and exaltation) instead.
Trace (study), 2018 was acquired from the exhibition by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. It is in the permanent collection, along with Trace (gray backdrop), 2016 from the same series. Images below document when Trace (study) was first on view in 2023 in the Nancy & Rich Kinder Building of the MFAH.
Ebb + Flow
March 29 - July 29, 2021
As we collectively enter a time abundant with hope and new beginnings, the TC Energy Center's Spring art exhibition studies themes of lifecycles and rebirth. Ebb + Flow was organized by Kinzelman Art Consulting in partnership with Houston-based gallery Koslov Larsen to highlight the work of 3 exciting artists - Margeaux Walter, David Reinfeld, and Brenda Biondo. Each artist's practice presents various creative photography methods of manipulation or staging to create thought provoking imagery centered around nature.
While navigating the exhibition, the viewer is encouraged to question what is natural and what is constructed-either by digital manipulation, juxtaposition, or physical modification of the environment by the artist-and furthermore reflect on this time of new beginnings. Ebb + Flow urges us to consider our own role within the environment—how we impact it daily, and how it similarly impacts us. Humankind is not above the cycle of nature; rather, we are deeply carved into it.
Quarantine Blues
June 20 – August 8, 2020
Quarantine Blues explores the color theory, psychology, and history behind the world's favorite color, blue. This group show showcases the breadth of styles used by Koslov Larsen’s gallery artists.
Artists in the show: Deborah Bay, Brenda Biondo, Mark Chen, Lou Vest, Karen Navarro, Paul-André Larocque, Joana P. Cardozo, Lou Peralta, Torrie Groening, Claire Rosen, Robert Langham III, Julia McLaurin, Margeaux Walter
Miranda Morris // Recline
April 25 - May 9, 2019
Inferno Gallery is delighted to present its final exhibition of the year, “Recline” by VADA senior Miranda Morris. “Recline” uses oil painting, body print, sculpture, and monotype to reimagine the reclining female nude archetype in traditional art through a multidimensional lens.
“Recline” celebrates the resting position as an intimately human experience beyond the historical practice of exhibiting the female body as the object of the gaze. By exploring the expressive, dreamlike, internal experience of the repose, Morris asks us to take a pause and re-examine our perceptions of female bodies and identities.
Image credit: Miranda Morris
Belle Carroll // INSIDE
March 28 - April 15, 2019
Inferno Gallery is excited to present “Inside” by Rice Architecture student Belle Carroll. “Inside” is an installation and sound piece that produces the familiar environment shared amongst all creatures, the womb, to discuss the beauty and violence that surrounds the body. By carving out a new, organic space within the traditional box of the gallery, the discourse of the original home, that of the womb, offers the opportunity to criticize how the bodies of those with a uterus are often reduced down to their reproductive system. Through recreating the intimate space that so many people try to control and legislate, “Inside” reminds us that the womb is inherently part of the human experience, thus we must treat people with wombs as such, human.
The Rice Thresher: ‘Inside’ transforms Inferno into an intimate womb
No More Mail Please // Dana Suleymanova and Rachel Wilkins
November 29 - December 15, 2018
Inferno Gallery is excited to present No More Mail Please, a collaborative body of work by Rachel Wilkins and Dana Suleymanova that probes the tension between the digital image and the printed image by utilizing both in multimedia collages. The work embeds obsolete technologies such as iPods, old iPhones, and digital picture frames within drawings created out of cheap materials such as cardboard, paper, and fabric. By undermining the familiar presentation of digital imagery in a clean, rectangular format, the artists question the sensual, sexy, and often feminine portrayal of media devices. The exhibition reconsiders the authority of the digital and proposes playful alternatives to thinking about the valuable and the valueless.
Image credit: Dana Suleymanova and Rachel Wilkins
Lindsey Douglas // I was looking for you
November 15 - 25, 2018
Inferno Gallery is excited to present an exhibition from Rice VADA major Lindsey Douglas, I was looking for you.
Enter into an installation that is sedentary itself, yet simultaneously immersive and interactive. Shadows appear as a combination of images: crumpled paper, a topography map, a leaf under a microscope, and a myriad of other confusing associations come to mind. In this immersive sculptural experience, that which is observable in the light is altered and takes on new identity in the dark.
The Rice Thresher: ‘I was looking for you’ illuminates Inferno Gallery
Violette Bule // CAN - YOU - DREAM - AMERICA
October 25 - November 10, 2018
Inferno Gallery is excited to present our first exhibition of the fall semester, CAN - YOU - DREAM - AMERICA. Violette Bule is a Venezuelan, Latinx, Houston-based artist who uses her work to open up dialogue about current social and political issues in the US.
CAN - YOU - DREAM - AMERICA engages with the multilayered reality of migration in the US. This project invites spectators to acknowledge a seemingly irresolvable tension between migration, acculturation, and profit—whether individual or systemic, cultural, identity, material or otherwise. Each piece establishes a bond between the individual perspective and a larger context of oppression, violence, hysteria, and deception—oftentimes-inescapable features of the American Dream.
The Rice Thresher: Immigration-focused ‘CAN – YOU – DREAM – AMERICA’ opens Inferno Gallery