Jade Thacker & Keith Lafuente
LOOKS
February 22nd - March 22nd, 2020

haul gallery is excited to announce LOOKS, a two-person show with Jade Thacker & Keith Lafuente. The show is named after the look on one’s face or the look someone wears. Someone might give you a look and you might give it back. 

The artists in LOOKS both make self-portraits (in some ways). In Jade Thacker’s paintings, this is easily understood. Visceral and digitally influenced self-portraits blend bold graphic outlines and shapes with hyperreal facial details. The surface of the paintings seem to glow, as these contrasting techniques interact. While every face in these paintings is somehow different, there is always a resemblance to her own. 

Keith Lafuente often uses fashion design as his medium-of-choice, but that easily becomes a variety of media and and presentations for this artist. No matter the look, Lafuente autobiographically explores traditional Filipino dress, anime, Filipino mythology, and queer bodies in his work. For this show, he is exhibiting ‘curtains’ that hang in front of the windows of the gallery. 

Jade Thacker is originally from Boston Massachusetts, currently living in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA in printmaking from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2014. Her  work deals with themes of racial identity, self image and discomfort.

Keith Lafuente (b.1992) is a multi-disciplinary artist who is continually revisiting ideas of identity, body, desire, and memory. Since graduating with a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2014, he has been self-producing annual fashion shows, with recent iterations at New Release and Museum Gallery. Past group exhibitions include those at Jack Hanley Gallery (NY), Magenta Plains (NY), Evening Hours (NY), San Jose ICA (CA), and AIRspace Projects (Sydney). On special nights in certain Brooklyn bars, he performs in drag as Mahal Kita (which translates to “I love you” in Tagalog).