Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol

The most recent body of work by the Los Angeles-based artist Sharon Lockhart (born 1964) engages the work of the Israeli dance composer and textile artist Noa Eshkol (1924 –2007). Since the 1990s Lockhart has examined specific moments in the everyday life of particular communities. Through extensive research and by working closely with her subjects, sometimes over a span of years, she gains an understanding of their day-to-day rhythms and routine movements. With her camera, she both choreographs and captures this collaborative experience.

Lockhart conceives this project as a two-person exhibition: she integrates her film installation and a series of her related photographs with a selection of scores, drawings, and textiles by Eshkol. The centerpiece is Lockhart’s Five Dances and Nine Wall Carpets by Noa Eshkol, a large-scale film installation that features a selection of Eshkol’s dances, performed with nine of her textile works, known as “wall carpets.” The Five channels are projected onto carefully positioned sculptural volumes that create a winding corridor through the exhibition’s primary gallery, encouraging the viewer to move through the space in tandem with each projection. The elements of the soundtrack, a ticking metronome and the subtle sounds of the dancers’ movements, work together to indicate proper timing.

While Eshkol considered her dances and wall carpets separate artistic practices, Lockhart presents them together for the first time, illuminating correspondences between them. The exhibition creates an encounter between the two artists that explores the nature of artistic practice, its preservation, and its interpretation, as well as the experience and representation of space, time, and movement.

The exhibition runs through March 24, 2013.