PHOTO:Sharon Lockhart

Sharon Lockhart is both a filmmaker and a photographer and she moves seamlessly between the two. Her work frames the quiet moments and details of everyday life while exploring the subtle relationships between photography and cinema. Much of her photographic work since 1994 has relied on the staging of scenes characteristic of filmmaking, or has investigated issues of time, sequence and narrative in a manner reminiscent of Conceptual Art. Lockhart’s films emphasize the photographic basis of the moving image, often using a fixed perspective to capture unexpected movements and human reactions in a given situation.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gladstone Gallery Archive

In an ongoing project, Sharon Lockhart focuses on a young woman named Milena, whom the artist met in Poland while producing her 2009 film “Podwórka”. Lockhart and the then nine-year-old Milena established a close friendship and collaborative involvement that has continued to grow and evolve. Through her work and relationship with Milena, Lockhart explores both visual and philosophical approaches to childhood, as well as the cultural and sociological operations inherent to photography. In her exhibition entitled “MILENA MILENA” is on presentation the video installation, “Antoine/Milena”, that pays homage to François Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows”. Lockhart captures Milena running through the Polish countryside to arrive at the sea. Drawing parallels between Truffaut’s protagonist and Milena, Lockhart poetically expresses the urgency of self-realization and speculation. A large-format photographic triptych, “Milena, Jarosław, 2013”, similarly explores the indefinable nature of both subject and medium. The photographs, which are installed on three architectural volumes, cannot be viewed in full from a single vantage point, requiring visitors to navigate the space to see the triptych in its entirety. These images depict Milena seated indoors, concealing and revealing her face to varying degrees. Her emotions and expressions shift from image to image, and the installation points to the multifaceted nature of development, self-expression and articulation. Linking histories and images, the themes explored in Lockhart’s collaborations with Milena resonate with another ongoing body of work on display, “Untitled Study (Rephotographed Snapshot)”, which the artist began in 1994. The series consists of rephotographed pictures from her personal history, the majority of which were originally taken during Lockhart’s childhood by her mother and feature family members. The artist’s offers a meditation on her own relationship to childhood and development, as well as portraiture and the aesthetic operations of media.

Info: Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 12/12/15-23/1/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gladstonegallery.com