The Lure of the Idyllic
Sharon Lockhart’s elusive
films and photographic works
It’s easy to find Sharon
Lockhart’s art merely beautiful. The American artist depicts idyllic
scenes such as wintry pine forests and Japanese farmers working in the
fields. The new art installment at Deutsche Bank’s IBC-C and a large
retrospective at the Hamburg Kunstverein, however, provide an opportunity
to get to know the artist better. Her works often involve years of
research during which Lockhart pursues her very own purposes, as Cheryl
Kaplan has discovered.
Sharon
Lockhart, Untitled (Boy with Guitar), 2005,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
What makes Sharon
Lockhart’s large-format photographs and films so complicated is
their fierce simplicity. Their beautiful surfaces and haunting presence
belie the years of research she spends in identifying and learning about
her subjects. Later, she tosses out most of this research while tightly
condensing what remains. It’s an extremely reductive way of working that
requires an enormous ballooning out and concomitant deflation to arrive at
the perfect visual pressure.
Sharon
Lockhart, Audition One, Simone and Max, 1994
Sander
Collection
"My projects might begin with an
image I see or are inspired by a book or film. Research has remained a
consistent part of my process in the pre-production of both my films and
photos. I love this aspect. I spend a long time working with the people in
the film, learning about them and developing a relationship. I research
images as well as the film’s subject and ideas, sharing this with whomever
is in front of the camera. I make binders for my subjects with images I’ve
collected."
Sharon
Lockhart,
Lunch Break
Installation, Duane Hanson: Sculptures of Life,
Scottish
National Gallery of Modern Art, 2003, Courtesy neugerriemschneider, Berlin
Gladstone
Gallery, New York Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
Over
the past year, she was traveling in Maine and New England to work on a
photo series and film called Lunch Break, inspired by a sculpture
by the American artist Duane
Hanson. Hanson’s work consists of a group of hyper-realistic Fiberglas
figures of construction workers taking a break to eat lunch. For her own
Lunch Break photo series, Lockhardt took pictures of workers at the National
Gallery of Scotland as they installed Hanson’s sculpture in a sober
white cube. Shooting the film, which is currently in the post-production
phase, led the artist into a dusty reality, from work site to work site,
from lunch break to lunch break. As Lockhart explains: "I wanted make
something about the social world of adults. I did a lot of traveling
around Maine, getting to know the nature of industry and labor in the
state. Of course, many of my assumptions about what I’d find were
incorrect. I’ve learned so much about New England, the place I grew up
in." Born in Norwood, Massachusetts just outside Boston in 1964, Lockhart
studied art at the San Francisco Art
Institute and received her MFA at Art
Center College of Design in Los Angeles.
At
the moment, a major retrospective of Lockhart’s work is on view at the Hamburger
Kunstverein. The exhibition, which runs through June 15, 2008,
features her films Pine
Flat and NO,
the photographic series Audition,
Pine
Flat Studio, as well as an earlier photographic version of Lunch
Break.
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Sharon Lockhart Pine Flat (Still from a
color film in 16 mm), 2005
©
Sharon Lockhart 2005
Courtesy
Gladstone Gallery, New York,
Blum
& Poe Gallery, LA, and
neugerriemschneider
Gallery, Berlin
Lockhart’s Lunch
Break appears to borrow not only from art history, but also from the
history of photography as social documentary. She seems to refer to famous
predecessors like Walker
Evans, who worked for the Farm
Security Administration in the 1930s documenting Americans during the
Great Depression. Other works of Lockhart reveal a more formal or serial
approach to documentary bringing to mind the German photographer August
Sander, who created typological surveys of workers, organizing the
portraits according to their type of labor.
Sharon
Lockhart, Untitled, 2005,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
In her work Pine Flat
Studio Lockhart has focused somewhat on a typology of adolescents: in
constructing Pine Flat Studio, the artist invited local children to
a barn in the town center where she photographed them in a manner
recalling the tradition of the portrait studio of American photographer Mike
Disfarmer(1884-1959). "Pine Flat Studio became a real
center for the town. When Disfarmer photographed, he made himself fairly
absent, allowing his visitors to create the image of themselves they
wanted. I wanted the photographs to be theatrical, where the children
represent themselves in a neutral space. I thought the local would be
represented through them, but not define their representation. Pine
Flat Portrait Studio was a site for us to watch films, make
photographs, and visit."
One of the photographs shot in Pine
Flat Studio is Untitled (Boy with Guitar), 2005, from the Deutsche
Bank Collection. It stands out from the other more rigid, formal
portraits by depicting the boy with his instrument in a makeshift
recording studio. The boy looks like a wanna-be rock star set against a
deep, almost burgundy red background. He’s clearly practicing to be
himself. This intimate portrait of a teenager differs from other works
that Lockhart made the same year. Untitled (2005), also in the
Deutsche Bank Collection, features the same elements: a human figure with
an instrument, but this time the large upside-down cello obscures its
owner. The atmosphere of the photograph is more cinematic, more narrative.
Sharon
Lockhart Teato Amazonas, 1999 Still from a color film
©
Sharon Lockhart 2005
Courtesy
Gladstone Gallery, New York,
Blum
& Poe, Los Angeles, and
neugerriemschneider,
Berlin
Lockhart’s process nearly always
begins with a retreat to an onsite location, from the Amazon to the Sierra
Nevada Mountains in California. She uses anthropological "field study" to
gain first-hand experience of her subjects. Then, Lockhart hides the
background story acquired during her exploratory phase with her subjects.
It’s exactly this dialectic of engagement and detachment that becomes the
basic principle of her art.
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