Rusty Lazer

Visiting New Orleans Artist

Rusty / Jay is a lifelong musician, a decades-long resident of New Orleans and the co-founder of New Orleans Airlift and its flagship project, Music Box Village. He brought New Orleans artists Big Freedia and Nicky Da B to prominence internationally as a manager, DJ and producer. His practice has been rooted in connection, collaboration, exploration and investigation, sprinkled with a healthy dose of practicality and improvisation. In his latest phase he’s turning away from the sprawling, community-focused artwork he’s known for and producing new music and experiences while learning to be somewhat singular creatively, unifying facets of his past adventures and identities into a kind of internal self-collaboration. 

Jami Girouard

New Orleans Visiting Artist

Jami Girouard is a New Orleans based artist interested in world building through the exploration of different aesthetic modalities including but not limited to lighting, textile, costume design and interior decor.

Jami will be using her time at the residency to delve into a sense of play by stepping back from the pressures to produce for capitalistic consumption and following where creative curiosity leads.

The Floozies are a collaborative partnership between artists Margot Couture and Libbie Allen. They bring a revolving cast of characters to life through performance, costuming and a commitment to the practice of Play. Drawing from regional folklore, Couture and Allen imagine the other-than-human entities that surround them and invite these beings out to be seen.

Margot Couture is a painter and multimedia artist whose work depicts bizarre characters, masked figures, and archetypal imagery. She is heavily inspired by New Orleans, her home, and its rich history of Carnival. For over a decade, she has produced underground parades and parties whose themes have explored issues of identity, rebellion, and sexuality. Her current work is a window into this world. In 2008 she received her BFA in Painting and Printmaking from VCU School of the Arts.

Libbie Allen works across mediums exploring the web of relationality that is life on Earth. Allen’s work is informed by her interest in myth, dreams, and the unknown, and is inspired by how women connect to nature through intuition. Using printmaking, photography, embroidery, painting, and natural dye, she aims to weave corporeal experiences with ephemeral manifestations of spirit. Allen received a Bachelor’s of Science in the Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008. Her work has been shown in the Ogden Museum of Art and is in the permanent collection at the Alexandria Museum of Art. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The Floozies will be using their time at Live in America Springdale and The Momentary to bring to life the archetypal figure The Magician. In Tarot, the magician is the first character the fool meets on his journey and symbolizes manifestation. Using oversized props, costumes, smoke, mirrors, and the surrounding woods, they will create a photo series. They hope to engage with people from the community by inviting them to also be characters in the photos.