Lu Zhang is a multi-disciplinary artist, researcher, and organizer who works in installation, sculpture, drawing, and text – often in response to a chosen site.
A GENTLE EXCAVATION
2019 / site-specific group exhibition / participating artists: Keenon Brice, A.K. Burns, Janea Kelly, Nicole Ringel, Wickerham & Lomax, augustine zegers, Lu Zhang
Presented by Resort Gallery and guest curator Allie Linn, A Gentle Excavation transforms the gallery into both the subject and site of research, production, and installation for work by seven artists and collectives.
A Gentle Excavation explores architecture as an indexical archive that captures in its walls and rafters evidence of its previous tenants and functions. When owners Alex Ebstein and Seth Adelsberger renovated the building into a gallery space in 2017, they discovered a surplus of artifacts chronicling its history as a residence, a florist, a taxidermist, a shoe repair store, a uniform company, a tailor, and a printing press. These archival remnants simultaneously document the past, recording the quotidian activity and domestic labor that the building has housed, and mirror the precarity of the gallery’s future in a city facing gentrification and redevelopment.
The participating artists in A Gentle Excavation transform 235 Park Avenue through site-specific interventions that dissect the building’s history, proposing that even a seemingly ordinary site demands close investigation. The archive is, thus, reconsidered as a site for sustained and collaborative exploration. Each of the included works functions as an intimate ode to the space and its history, approaching this prompt from a unique perspective: by exploring the distinction between memory and history, by examining the gendered implications of domestic architecture, and even by inventing speculative archives for other lives the building may have lived. The resulting works fuse a factual past with an imagined future into a temporally compressed and surreal, ethereal site.
photos by Michael Bussell