A.K. Burns and Katherine Hubbard will begin two months of work at Recess as part of its signature program, Session. Recess invites artists in Session to use its storefront space as studio, exhibition venue and grounds for experimentation. During their first public collaboration, Burns and Hubbard will adapt Recess into a working installation that will intentionally conflate the hair and art salon. They consider the salon a site for public engagement. The Brown Bear is a space to gather, exchange ideas and generate personal aesthetics; a site to collectively explore, what does it look like? During public hours, visitors may come in to receive free body-hair modifications and add to the dialogue surveying the paradigms of appearance.

In the artists words:

Leading with the question, what does it look like?, describing it is pivotal to formulating a response. It is The Brown Bear, a queer experience, the experience of “packing vag”, of being hirsute. For us, it is personal. This kind of personal is political, and this salon provides a space for the political to be public.

Drawing from our own experiences, feminist hysteries, and notions of queer aesthetics, we will build a social archive of ontological signifiers around the formation of self. The environment will operate like an exploded zine and visitors are invited to utilize the free Xerox machine. Additionally, Burns and Hubbard have created a series of sculptural head dressings that they will continue to produce and offer as wearable works on loan.

Every Saturday, the Brown Bear will reinvent itself during a curated salon, in which Burns and Hubbard invite another artist to cohabitate the storefront. Contributing artists at the Saturday salons are asked to challenge the privilege of sight when considering the question, what does it look like? Presentations will feature sound, literature, taste, smell and touch.

The Brown Bear is open Wednesday thru Saturday each week. The artists are available for drop-in hair cuts, on Thursdays and Fridays and by appointment only on Saturdays.

Schedule of Saturday Performances:

October 30 Corrine Fitzpatrick • November 6 MPA • November 13 Sergei Tcherepnin • November 20 Cyrus Saint Amand Poliakoff • November 27 Ty-Lör Boring • December 4 Joshua Kit-Clayton • December 11 A.K. Burns & Katherine Hubbard

About the Artists:

A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. A.K.’s practice explores interpretation and implications of sexuality, power and language, often taking the form of sculpture, video and/or social actions. A.K. is a founding member of the artists activist group W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy). In collaboration with A.L. Steiner, Community Action Center, a feature length social sexual video portrait was released this fall simultaneously at Taxter & Spengemann, NY and Horton Gallery, Berlin. A.K. also launched the inaugural issue of RANDY, a feminist queer arts magazine, in collaboration with Sophie Mörner at Capricious Publishing. She received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

Katherine Hubbard lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recently, her exhibition and performance, a collaboration with the artist, MPA, was presented at Higher Pictures in New York. The performance explored the active photographic documentation of performance as a way to simultaneously establish and redefine power structures. The resulting images were featured in the artist publication RANDY. Her sculptural, fiber, and costume-based works have been included in the exhibitions In Place of Process at the Rockland Center for the Arts; in Threads at the SOMArts Gallery and Pale Fire at the California College of the Arts, both in San Francisco. In addition, she has exhibited at Dome Colony X at X Initiative in New York. She received an MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.