LAIR FERA Opening show
presenting works by Keith Aguilar, Monica Canilao, Donna Dolore, ektor garcia, Heather Renée Russ, Stewart Stout & Xara Thustra
The Lair will also be open to the public for Bushwick Open Studios Saturday and Sunday 11am-5pm.
ektor garcia is a queer artist from California. His multi-disciplinary installations feature welding, crochet and ceramics. His work has been exhibited in Mexico City, Europe and the USA. ektor has had several gallery and museum exhibitions, including at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and at the Australian Center for Contemporary Art.
Heather Renée Russ is a Multi-Media Visual Artist 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. She is a founder of Cutter Photozine, a San Francisco based collaborative photography publication. She is also a founder of Club Feral, a multi-gender queer art, performance, and dance space in San Francisco. Her work has been shown at SF Camerawork Gallery, Cinders Gallery, Space Create Gallery, Garner Arts Center and in The Guggenheim Stillspotting NYC project. Heather Renée Russ makes work from the blind spots and often explores complex identity and the struggle to find and create place. She is a part of the Lair Fera Queer Art Collective in Brooklyn, New York 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.
Monica Canilao From boats to portraits, everything I make I use to reimagine the meaning of home, the power of collectivity and the imprint history has left on me.
Stewart Stout is a Brooklyn based artist and current MFA candidate at Hunter College, working primarily in video and installation. His current series Prairie Fire 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.
Xara Thustra Both an activist and artist, and a key player in San Francisco’s “Mission School” (alongside Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen and Chris Johanson), Xara Thustra has been pushing the envelope socially and artistically for 15-plus years in San Francisco. Thustra’s ever-evolving creative media have included graffiti, screenprinted posters, calendars, murals, paintings, video, music, performance and protest. Socially, Thustra has been responsible for anti-war actions, gay activism, feeding the hungry, anti-capitalist actions, squats such as 949 Market and much more.
Donna Dolore is a pornographic actress and adult movie director, based in San Francisco, California. She was formerly the director of the websites Public Disgrace, Bound Gang Bangs, and Ultimate Surrender, all three produced by Kink.com. Virtually all of her performances and directorial projects have been within the genre of BDSM pornography. She has appeared as a subject in a number of documentaries, including Graphic Sexual Horror in 2009 and Public Sex, Private Lives in 2012. She became interested in photography and the politics of sex and gender equality as a teen, and studied both at New York University and its Tisch School of the Arts.