The Resort, a collaboration between Robert Hickerson and Brooklyn based painter Kerry Lessard. Starting with a large remodel in the 1940s, Grossinger’s Country Club was the place to go to escape the turmoil of the city. It was a place to find romance and relaxation amongst a lush landscape. Following economic hardships in the 1980’s, the hotel foreclosed and was left dormant; It’s once extravagant halls, pools and living spaces are now vacant and rotting. This became a place of interest to Lessard and Hickerson as it demonstrated the repercussions of overindulgence.
The resulting work, The Resort, took the form of a video piece, a series of photographs, and a performance taking place at a brownstone in Bushwick, a neighborhood in midst of high rates of gentrification and real estate wars, highlights the nostalgia and memories that the place evokes. Falling on the eve of Valentine’s Day, 2016, The Resort takes the romantic narrative created within the 1960’s promotional material for Grossinger’s Country Club and subjects it to the decay that the hotel itself has succumbed to. The performance taking place within the gallery space invited the audience to participate in fabricating this narrative through photography, materializing the cultural fetishization of the past. The evening was scored live by Brooklyn based musician Anders Nils.
