Sharon Lockhart
Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago
March 3 - May 20, 2001
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, presents a major exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist SHARON LOCKHART's work. A survey of photographs and films from 1993 to the present, this exhibition is the largest and most significant solo presentation of the artist in an American museum to date. Sharon Lockhart features approximately 35 photographs and multi-photograph series, and includes screenings of her films Khalil, Shaun, A Woman Under the Influence (1994), Goshogaoka (1997), Shirley (1999), (created with artist Daniel Marlos), and Teatro Amazonas (1999) in the MCA Theater.
The exhibition is curated by MCA Associate Curator Dominic Molon.
"Sharon Lockhart's work presents the fragile moments and overlooked details of the everyday through the removed lens of conceptual photography and structuralist film," said Dominic Molon. "Her photographs and films are the result of meticulous organization and elaborate production, yet are profoundly intimate and immediately affecting. Lockhart's work encourages the viewer toward a more vigilant observation of the photographic and cinematic image, provoking a heightened consideration of perspective or of seemingly insignificant objects, gestures, and details."
Sharon Lockhart's photographs complicate the various visual codes that determine our ways of seeing. Since 1994, she has created numerous multi-photographic works that investigate concepts of time, narrative, and sequence.
These works create a tension between the intimacy and familiarity of a single image and the detached, categorical form of the overall whole. Much of Sharon Lockhart's early work-such as the five-photograph series Auditions (1994), or her Untitled photographs from 1996-employed the staging of scenes characteristic of filmmaking, requiring rigorous research and set-up to produce quiet scenes of the everyday.
The work that she has created in Japan, Mexico, and Brazil from 1997 to 1999, begins with a predetermined photographic situation, and allows subtle variations to emerge from image to image through collaboration with the subject or by simply recording the unseen changes that naturally occur over time.
Sharon Lockhart's films emphasize the photographic basis of the moving image, often using a fixed perspective to capture fragile and unexpected movements and human reactions in a given situation. Teatro Amazonas for example, records the occasional gestures and ambient sounds of a Brazilian audience listening to a 24-minute choral work by California composer Becky Allen which gradually fades to reveal the indistinct murmuring of the people at the conclusion of the performance.
Creating the illusion of an audience watching the audience viewing the film, Sharon Lockhart's film joins much of her recent work in presenting images of other cultures-such as Mexico and Japan-in a manner that addresses the complexities of cross-cultural representation.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated, 112-page full-color catalogue-the first major English language publication on the artist to date-featuring essays by art historian Norman Bryson and exhibition curator Dominic Molon. This is the first publication to present a full range of Sharon Lockhart's color and black-and-white photographs from throughout her career.
Sharon Lockhart is scheduled to travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, from June 9 through September 2, 2001.
This exhibition and its national tour are sponsored by the Sara Lee Foundation.
SHARON LOCKHART was born in 1964 in Norwood, Massachusetts. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
Sharon Lockhart's work was recently presented in a major solo exhibition organized by the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, The Netherlands in 1999, which traveled to the Kunsthalle Zurich and the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 2000. Her work has been included in numerous important group exhibitions such as the 2000 and 1997 Biennial exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; "Cinéma Cinéma" at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, (1999); and "Truce: Echoes of Art in an Age of Endless Conclusions" at SITE Santa Fe (1997).
Her film Goshogaoka has been screened internationally at such prestigious venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York (as part of its New Directors/New Films series), the Rotterdam Film Festival, and the Sundance Film Festival. Teatro Amazonas has been screened at the Internationales Forum des Jungen Films, film festival in Berlin (2000), the Pitti Imagine, Florence, (1999), and the New York Film Festival (2000).
MCA - MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CHICAGO
220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago 60611.2604
