Sharon Lockhart

Sharon Lockhart (born 1964) is an American artist whose work considers social subjects primarily through motion film and still photography.^[1] She received her BFA from San Francisco Art institute in 1991 and her MFA from Art Center College of Design in 1993.^[2] She has been a Radcliffe fellow, a Guggenheim fellow, and a Rockefeller fellow. Her films and photographic work have been widely exhibited at international film festivals and in museums, cultural institutions, and galleries around the world. She was an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Fine Arts,^[3] resigning from the school in August 2015 in response to the continued administrative turmoil at Roski to take a position at the California Institute for the Arts.^[4] Lockhart lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Work

Goshogaoka Girls Basketball Team (1998)

For Goshogaoka Girls Basketball Team, a series of 12 photographs,^[5] Lockhart turned to images of a girls' basketball team at a school in the Tokyo suburb of Goshogaoka, mimicking the style of the professional athlete's publicity still. The images were made in conjunction with the artist's first film, Goshogaoka, of the team executing elaborate (actually choreographed) practice drills.^[6] Whereas the camera in Goshogaoka remains fixed in one place the entire film, the viewpoint is constantly changing in Goshogaoka Girls Basketball Team, creating visual movement around the gym as well as around the players.^[7]

Duane Hanson works

In a monumental four-part photographic work of 2003, Lockhart pays homage to Duane Hanson’s monumental sculpture Lunch Break (1989). The sculpture depicts three construction workers taking their lunch among the scaffolding and ladders from which they have descended, while the photographs depict two museum preparators installing the work. A large-scale diptych, Maja and Elodie, depicts a woman interacting with Hanson’s more intimate sculpture, Child with Puzzle (1978). The sculpture represents a girl sitting on a rug making a jigsaw puzzle, which Lockhart photographs with the young woman sitting across from the sculpture.^[8]

Pine Flat (2006)

Set in the backdrop of a rural village in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, the feature-length 16mm film Pine Flat (2006) and large-scale portraits focus on the community’s youth and the experience of American childhood. For the series of nineteen portrait photographs of Pine Flat’s youth, Lockhart set up a traditional studio in a nearby barn, where the children could sit in the historic method.^[9] In preparation for each photograph, Lockhart took Polaroids so that each of her subjects could have some say about the way he or she would be portrayed.^[10] Lockhart asked the Los Angeles architecture firm Escher GuneWardena to design her series of Pine Flat exhibitions.^[11]

Lunch Break (2008)

In the installation Lunch Break (2008), designed in collaboration with architects Escher Gunewardena, a single tracking shot slowly slides down a locker-filled corridor where ironworkers at a Maine shipyard^[12] eat their lunch^[13] (teasing the 11-minute event into 83 minutes of film).^[14] The soundtrack, designed in collaboration with composer Becky Allen and filmmaker James Benning, weaves the diegetic tones created by worker’s voices with industrial sounds and music. In a series of accompanying photographs, Lockhart depicts the workers interacting with each other, including a series of independent business run by the ironworkers catering to their coworkers. Finally eighteen more formalized still-lives of the workers’ lunch boxes serve as portraits of their owners—in each case, the worker is both framed by and frames the work place.^[15]

Sharon Lockhart/Noa Eshkol (2013)

A series of Lockhart’s films from 2013 are based on the dances created by Israeli artist, choreographer and dance theorist Noa Eshkol (1924-2007).^[16] Lockhart discovered Eshkol’s work on a research trip sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles’s Tel Aviv-Los Angeles Partnership, and dancers from Ms. Eshkol’s company perform in the videos.^[17]

Notable works

• Goshogaoka (1998)
• Teatro Amazonas (1999)
• NŌ (2003)
• Pine Flat (2006)
• Lunch Break (2008)
• Exit (2008)
• Podwórka (2009)
• Double Tide (2009)
• Four Exercises in Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation (2011)
• Abalone Hunter (2014)

Exhibitions

Lockhart had solo exhibitions at international venues including Wiener Secession, Austria; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Fogg Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge; Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, Spain; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Kunsthalle Zürich; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany, and MAK-Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna. Her films have been included in the New York Film Festival, Vienna International Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, and the Sundance Film Festival, where Lunch Break and Exit were selected in 2009. The Lunch Break exhibition debuted at the Wiener Secession in November, 2008 and was later exhibited at Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Saint Louis, and the Colby College Museum of Art, Maine.^[18]

The artist is represented by neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Gladstone Gallery, New York; and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles.^[19]

Collections

Lockhart's work is represented in numerous important collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Eli Broad Family Foundation, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis; Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among others.^[20]

Recognition

Lockhart received artist-in-residence fellowships from the DAAD, Berlin (1999), the Asian Cultural Council Grant, Ibaragi, Japan (1996) and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (1995).^[21] In 2013, she was shortlisted for the £40,000 2015 biennial Artes Mundi prize.^[22]

References

External links

• The Films of Sharon Lockhart
• Sharon Lockhart at Kadist Art Foundation