Heather Renee Russ works across photography, installation, printmaking, video and bio art. Her multidisciplinary practice incorporates queer femme signifiers and organic marine materials into works that engage with the tumultuous nature of the shoreline. This coastal space becomes a metaphor for collaboration, refuge, inequity and precarity. She muddles the synthetic and the organic and plays with the liminal and the fixed. Imbued with algae and emotion, her tumble of work expresses joy, grief and sexuality while reflecting the times we are in.
In 2020 Heather Renée completed a residency at MASS MoCA with an artist grant where created an installation about precarity that was then shown at SomoS Art House in Berlin in an exhibit dedicated to queer feminist futures. In 2019 she was in residence at Vermont Studio Center with a merit award where she developed her refracted projections that were shown at Satellite Miami during Miami Art Week. In 2019 she also showed photographs from her series Body Exaltations and the End of Land at Ethan Cohen’s KuBE gallery in New York in “Darkest Before Dawn” an exhibit about art in a time of uncertainty.
Heather Renée has also exhibited in and organized countless events in the thriving underground art scenes where she has spent much of her career-most notably in spaces in NYC, Beijing and San Francisco. Creating spaces for artists to engage one another has been an important part of her practice. From 2016-2019 Heather Renée ran Lair Fera, a queer collaborative art space in Brooklyn. In San Francisco she co-produced Club Feral- an experimental multi-gender art, dance and performance space. She also served on the Board of Directors for MIX NYC, a queer experimental film festival in New York City. The experience of stewarding spaces for queer artists in ever shifting environments directly informs her work.
