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The Lab is housed within the Redstone Building in San Francisco, a landmark physical structure that encapsulates a specific history of union organization and labor strikes. But within its ground-floor interior, the gallery’s richly decrepit ceiling tells its own overlapping (hi)stories. A far more abstracted and intersubjective narrative, collectively traced through so many layers of flaking paint, faded residues, holes, grids of piping, track and theatre lighting, ducts, vents, and the incidental patterns created by absent ceiling tiles. And yet this time-inscribed canopy is most often overlooked, if not willfully ignored.

The gallery ceiling will serve as both the site and subject of A floorless room without walls, this year’s annual juried exhibition at the Lab. Like any group exhibition, A floorless room without walls will comprise projects created in a range of media, embedded with divergent formal, thematic and conceptual concerns. Yet curators Marcella Faustini and Chris Fitzpatrick will leave the gallery walls and floor blank for the most part, selecting projects that resonate formally, spatially, temporally, narratively, or phenomenologicaly with the gallery’s ceiling.

As the entire exhibition will hang from or directly intervene in the ceiling, this open call invites artists to submit existing works or propose new projects that consider verticality, that grapple with the governing principle of gravity, that float or levitate, that mirror the ceiling’s stratification as productive decay, that consider the paradox of a room with no floor or walls, that approach the gallery itself as a fluid object or a terminal of intersecting forms and ideas, or that intervene within the political and conceptual implications of ceilings themselves and how our approach to them has changed over time, among other things.