The Other Shore

September 5-28, 2025

The Other Shore

Curated by Rachel Frank

Opening reception September 5, 6-8pm

Press Release

While thinking about this show, I happened to rewatch Chris Marker’s seminal sci-fi film, La Jetée, and was struck by several thematic resonances with ideas I’d been contemplating. The film opens with the description of “a man marked by an image from his childhood... that upset him, and whose meaning he was to grasp only years later...”.1 It constructs its narrative through the juxtaposition of a series of still black and white photographs—staged photos from the narrator’s “memories” combined with found photos—to create a fragmented series of static “moving images” woven together by the speaker’s récit, and reminding us that the act of remembering (and its links to forgetting) is always jumbled, splintered, just slightly out of reach: order becomes confused, the boundaries between time and place become blurry. In the film, the protagonist is haunted by a memory of the past event and is drawn to a woman from that memory, traveling between time periods in his desire to return to and restore an always impossible event, eventually muddling his past, present and future as his final act of forgetting/remembering.

A phrase in Buddhism, “the other shore” represents a crossing of water or hardship to reach spiritual connection or enlightenment. The other shore can also represent a place or concept that slightly out of reach, a body both intimate and interior but always already inaccessible or in withdrawal. Contradictory in nature, it can represent both the past (a memory, a loss) or a possible future (a desire, a hope, or a longing). Between our gaze and the other shore, we navigate the detritus of memory, tradition, decay, loss, fragmentation, and healing. The Other Shore brings together three artists: Leah Bailis, Z. Cecilia Lu, and Heather Renée Russ whose works in sculpture, photography, bio-art, and installation play with these themes.

In Leah Bailis’ sculptures fabric and thread, both porous and malleable materials, are used for her memory jugs. These vessels, like memory are not watertight and instead are made from a patchwork of sewn parts and collected refuse from the city. Encapsulating and elevating discarded materials like packing foam and cheap artificial flowers alongside potentially lost items like keys, these pieces create constructed artifacts of time and place that reference folk-art traditions.

Z. Cecilia Lu’s sculptures explore “the body as an assemblage of memories, environments, medicines, and desires; as contingent and dynamic; as a site for healing, regeneration, death, and decay.” With ceramic sculptural forms that resemble altars and tables used for healing the body spiritually or treating the body medically, she utilizes plants related to healing: Ginseng, mugwort (both considered medicinal and conversely invasive), and various roots and fruit pits.

Heather Renée Russ uses scanner photography and bio-art to explore both the healing vibrancy and the displacement of queer communities, linking their fragmentation to ecology, environmental climate change, and gentrification. In her/their work, algae growing in the femme signifier of a high- heeled shoe acts as a hidden (and often forgotten) agent of healing taking in carbon to produce oxygen, while common beach plants are rendered splintered and uncannily hyperreal/unreal with scanner photography.

1 Marker, Chris, director. La Jetée. Argos Films, 1964.

Leah Bailis (she/her) received a BA in Film at Bard College and an MFA IN Studio Art at UNC Chapel Hill. She attended the Lacoste School of the Arts in France and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and was a resident of the Bemis Center (Omaha, NE.) A former member of the artist-run space Vox Populi in Philadelphia, her exhibitions also include Lump Gallery (Raleigh, NC), Contemporary Art Museum (Raleigh, NC), Fleischer Ollman (Philadelphia, PA), Delaware Center for Contemporary Art (Wilmington, DE), Philadelphia International Airport. Bailis currently lives outside of Philadelphia with her wife and two daughters.

Z. Cecilia Lu (she/her) is a Chinese-American artist based in Troy, NY. Her work is interested in non-western practices of medicine and care, local landscapes, and herbal traditions. She often creates installations composed of sculpture, ceramic, organic matter, and participation. She has had solo shows at Collar Works (Troy, NY), The Soil Factory (Ithaca, NY) and The Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art (Ithaca, NY). She was artist-in-residence at Monson Arts Center (Monson, ME), Jingdezhen Pottery Workshop (Jingdezhen, China), Woodstock Byrdcliffe (Woodstock, NY), and has received grants from The Puffin Foundation and The Northern Clay Center. She received her BFA from Cornell University.

Heather Renée Russ (she/they) works across experimental photography, installation and bio-art. Her multidisciplinary practice incorporates queer femme signifiers and organic materials into works that engage with queer ecologies, femme labor and climate grief. Russ has upcoming solo exhibitions at NARS Foundation in NYC and SUNY Old Westbury and will be included in Solastalgia at Kleefeld Contemporary in Long Beach. Russ has shown with Field Projects in NYC, SPRING/BREAK Art Show NYC, NADA Miami with Paradice Palase, IMT Gallery in London, SoMos in Berlin, and Satellite Art Fair in Miami. She has also exhibited at apexart, Flux Factory, ChaShaMa, and Ethan Cohen’s Kube in New York. Russ has completed residencies at NARS Foundation, MASS MoCA, Wassaic Project, ChaShaMa North, TransBorder Art on Governors Island, and Vermont Studio Center. Russ is a member of the EFA Studio Program where she has her studio in Manhattan.

Rachel Frank (she/her) has previously curated exhibitions at the SPRING/BREAK Art Fair and Field Projects and for 8-years co-curated a yearly video program with the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture which screened in various locations in NYC and LA. Her practice combines sculpture, video, and performance to explore our relationships and shifting perspectives towards non-human species, investigating how past species, rituals, and objects can shape our environmental future. Her performance pieces have been shown at HERE, Socrates Sculpture Park, and The Bushwick Starr in NYC, Franconia Sculpture Park (MN), and at The Watermill Center in collaboration with Robert Wilson. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include MOCA Tucson (AZ), the SPRING/BREAK Art Show (NYC), Thomas Hunter Projects at Hunter College (NYC), Standard Space (Sharon, CT), and Geary Contemporary (NYC). She works as a licensed wildlife rehabilitator at the Wild Bird Fund in Manhattan.

•••