Installation views of Half a Second or Less at the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin, 2026. Photo: Edward Gia.
Organized by 2025–26 VAC Education Fellow, Mary Alice Smith, and 2024–26 VAC Curatorial Fellow, Maysa Martins
“Edward Gia (b. 1998, New York City) situates his photographic practice in exploring the familial, matriarchal, and diverse landscapes he inhabits. Pulling from ancestral and migrant memory, Gia cultivates a personal, identity-based approach to the camera. In Half a Second or Less, Gia’s photographs hail from New York, Mexico, and Texas, exploring the terrains of selfhoodand belonging in these locations. Inserting himself in the frame, the performativity of the body becomes an essential tool for for understanding his presence in familiar and unfamiliar settings. A lingering presence is still felt through a shadow or gesture that refuses to be obscured, even when the physical body remains absent from the frame. The self and other recurring figures, turing away from the camera, search for connection and heritage that might have been left or lost along the way. Smaller photographs lie atop as larger image, merging various states of experience and memory, connecting the past and the present.”
- Angela Amaro
Angela Amaro is an art historian specializing in contemporary Latinx art. Within this scope, her research interests also include Chicanx art and aesthetics, queer performance art, and art dealing with the body.