Lair Fera / Queer Artist Collective / Open Studio
Featuring works by:
Caitlin Rose Sweet
Heather Renée Russ
Keith Aguiar
Stewart Stout
Open Studios Hours: Saturday and Sunday noon-6pm
Cocktail Social : Sunday 4pm-7pm
Caitlin Rose Sweet explores the intersections between craft, queerness, and pop culture to position queerness as a site for incessant transformation and possibilities. Her playful work resists assimilation and mastery through an intentional disinvestment in finished work and proper use of materials. Sweet has shown internationally from Portland Oregon to San Francisco Bay Area, New York City and Berlin. This includes such exhibitions as Mix 26 (NY 2013), Craftivism (NY 2013), Invisible Landscapes (PDX 2014), and Words as Objects(PDX 2014). Sweet received her MFA in Applied Craft and Design from PNCA/OCAC in 2014 and lives in Brooklyn.
Heather Renée Russ is a multi-media visual artist, curator and arts organizer from San Francisco. She received her MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York City where she was the recipient of the Alice B. Odett Scholarship and the Thomas Reiss Award. Prior to moving to New York she founded Cutter Photozine, a San Francisco based collaborative photography publication and Club Feral, a multi-gender queer art, performance, and dance space also in SF. Her work has been shown at SF Camerawork, Cinders Gallery, Space Create Gallery, Garner Arts Center and in The Guggenheim Stillspotting NYC project. She currently serves on the board of directors for MIX NYC, a queer experimental film festival in New York. Heather Renée is also part of the Lair Fera queer artist collective in Brooklyn where she currently resides.
Keith Aguiar, often working under the pseudonym of Brother Bramm, is an artist focusing in Composite and Digital Photography. His work has been profiled by the San Francisco Bay Guardian and DNA magazine. His work has been exhibited at SF Camerawork, Galleria De La Raza, and Grey Area Gallery in San Francisco, CA and most recently at Space Create Gallery in Newburgh, NY. His work examines personal intersections between spirituality, queerness, childhood and memory.
Stewart Stout is a Brooklyn based artist and current MFA candidate at Hunter College, working primarily in video and installation. His work meshes utopic notions of nature and sacred sites with industrial spaces and materials, building landscapes within the projected image and the installation it is situated in. Using the idyllic garden, historically a site of acquiescence to the dominant political ideology of capital, white supremacy and patriarchy, as a staging ground for queer bodies creates an imagined site of refuge and a pastoral vision of resistance.