Sharon Lockhart: Movements and Variations in Two Parts at Jan Mot and Gladstone Gallery
Gladstone Gallery: 12 Rue du Grand Cerf, Brussels
7 September – 20 October, 2018
The exhibition features a series of photographic and sculptural works that relate to the artist’s long standing interest in portraiture, choreography and the empowerment of women. For many years Lockhart has collected and cut branches of manzanita, buckeye, and black walnut in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, after which she transforms them into physical mementoes by sanding. The sticks become symbolic – material remnants of a specific geographical place that become further charged through the fastidiousness of the interventions (refinements), which in turn repurposes them for casting and thus transforms them into sculpture. Of course, the material transformation from wood to bronze also elevates the works within the hierarchical value system adopted by and attributed to the art historical canon.
For Movements and Variations, nine different sticks are presented in two forms: a series of six bronze sculptures with various patinas and nine photographic portraits showing a model protagonist posed in various positions whilst brandishing one of the sticks. The sculptural works were arranged in collaboration with an Ikebana master, the ancient Japanese art of formal flower arranging derived from the Shinto belief system, and in various combinations of elements, increasingly reductive in number. They are elegant, cool and spare, but yet remain sticks, and as such want to be held.
The corresponding photographic works capture how each of the sticks has been developed into a movement or a pose, where a single model is shown grasping a single stick, enacting the specifics of the artist’s choreographed direction, and whose posture seems in part governed by the shape and weight of each branch. The poses suggest individual steps of a broader dance, each a truncated moment perhaps implying defence, alertness, aggression, or at least some kind of assertion, which, on only one occasion, is supplemented by the model’s gaze. The model is crisply delineated against a completely blank backdrop, so that the viewer can be in no doubt that she is untainted by the presence or connotation of any distraction.
Like most of Lockhart’s best work, Movements and Variations elicits a meditative aesthetic experience – it conveys a powerful sense of self-possession and autonomy, a kind of serene ascetic quietude engendered by the simplicity of both the compositional elements and human impulses depicted.
On view until October 20th 2018
Jan Mot
Petit Sablon / Kleine Zavel 10
1000 Brussels, Belgium
+32 2 514 10 10
office@janmot.com
Wednesday till Friday 2 – 6.30 pm
Saturday 12 – 6 pm
Gallery website: janmot.com
Gladstone Gallery
12 Rue du Grand Cerf
Brussels, Belgium 1000
Phone: +32 2 513 35 31
Fax: +32 2 513 34 97
Tuesday – Friday: 10am – 6pm
Saturday: 12pm – 6pm
Gallery website: gladstonegallery.com
About Sharon Lockhart
Sharon Lockhart (born 1964) lives and works in Los Angeles. Lockhart’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at international institutions including Fonzadione Fotografia Modena, Italy; the Museu Colecção Berardo, Lisbon; Arts Club of Chicago; Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham; Wiener Secession, Austria; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Wolfsburg Museum, Germany; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her films have been included in the New York Film Festival, Vienna International Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, and the Sundance Film Festival. In 2017, Lockhart represented Poland at the 57th Venice Biennale with her multidisciplinary project, Little Review, organized with National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland, and more recently, presented a selection of works from the Venice Biennale at FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio.
Artist website
lockhartstudio.com
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