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.
HEADSPACE
405 E Oliver Street, Baltimore
October 2017 - January 2018 / site-specific evolving installation
Headspace engages the front room exhibition space of Area 405 in an expanded studio experiment. The installation presents fluctuating arrangements of drawings, prints, and sculptural objects. Through repeated movements and serial actions, I treat drawing as akin to taking a long meditative walk. I employ shifts of scale, repetition, found materials, and cut-outs to frame the surfaces, textures, topography, and architecture of Area 405. Adapting the dependable modernist grid to be flexible, fallible, and vibrating, I present moments of intense focus and gestures of play within the container of a studio. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, Headspace will remain in flux, activated through shifts, additions, reconfigurations, and visitor interactions.
As the building houses 40 artist studios and hosts programs and exhibitions, I interpret 405 East Oliver Street to be a site of making and a site of gathering. In this landscape, I interrogate the role of the studio as a physical and mental space: as a site of learning, a site of confrontation, a site of routine, a site of doubt, a site of endurance, and a site of rest. Within this flexible context, I attempt to devise a way of working as a place to retreat to, a place for durational ceasing, a place to reconsider, establish language, and begin again.
photos by Joseph Hyde