Opening Reception: Saturday, May 31, 2-5 pm
Exhibition Dates: May 31 – June 28, 2025
Stephen LaReign Hues is a director, choreographer, costume designer and photographer currently living in Los Angeles. While living in Montreal during the 1990’s, working in dance, costume, and drag performance, Stephen carried a camera everywhere, amassing an astonishing archive of over 30,000 photographs taken between 1990 and 2000.
The first in a projected series of exhibitions and publications cultivated from Stephen’s archives, the photographs gathered in Reflection are from staged shoots with members and friends of the legendary Montreal drag performance group, ‘House of Pride’, in costume, drag and various inventively designed outfits.
Working within vocabularies of dance and art, many of Stephen’s images feature the human body in iconic sculptural poses or moving dynamically through space. Their interests are also connected to the artistic, theoretical and political discourses around the body at that time. Though Stephen’s pictures of drag were intended to be more joyful than political, nevertheless, they reflect the charged times during which they were created and today must be understood within that context.
Throughout this decade of photography, Stephen was openly influenced and inspired by an eclectic range of photographers from all eras of photographic history. The pictorial style and vocabulary are at once timeless and rooted within its time; familiar yet distinctive, embodying as they do, an exuberance that reflects the spirit of the times, and who Stephen is as an artist and as a person.
