Sharon Lockhart

Shot in Gotland, Sweden, EVENTIDE is a 30-minute single take filmed as dusk turned to night during the annual Perseid meteor shower. From its stationary position, the camera records the slow entrance and exit of several figures exploring the rocky shore flashlights in hand. The rhythmic pacing of their explorations reveal a considered yet organic choreography of bodies slowly moving in and out of frame in the liminal space where land meets water, where day meets night, where earth meets stars. EVENTIDE, like much of Lockhart’s work, invites contemplation, asks us to consider what we see and hear. The film has a solemn, almost dreamlike quality, one heightened by the night sky, the silhouettes searching in the dark, and the overwhelmingness of nature.

A major new film installation by American artist and filmmaker Sharon Lockhart, Rudzienko is a deeply affecting and formally inventive collaborative work made with a group of adolescent girls living at the Youth Center for Socio-Therapy in Rudzienko, Poland.

Celebrated for his minimal, monumental landscape studies, James Benning turns to the intimacy of the portrait in his latest film, TWENTY CIGARETTES. Referencing Warhol’s screen tests, 1930s Hollywood glamour, and the disappearing cigarette break, the film captures 20 of Benning’s friends (including filmmaker Sharon Lockhart, cultural theorist Dick Hebdige, and book editor Janet Jenkins) satiating their smoke cravings. Each shot’s length is determined by the time it takes each subject to smoke a cigarette, and over the course of the film a dynamic range of personalities emerges out of an array of physical characteristics, distinctive settings, and personal relationships to the camera. (Amy Beste and Jessica Bardsley)

Double Tide documents the work of a female clam digger in the mudflats of coastal Maine and is filmed on the rare occasion in which low tide occurs twice within daylight hours—once at dawn and once at dusk.

Double Tide documents the work of a female clam digger in the mudflats of coastal Maine and is filmed on the rare occasion in which low tide occurs twice within daylight hours—once at dawn and once at dusk.

‘Podwórka’ captures six groups of neighbourhood youth as they play in seemingly deserted yards, offering an intimate portrait of daily life in Łódź, Poland. Shot with a fixed camera, this single-channel video projection highlights American artist Sharon Lockhart’s concern for the interrelationship between the still and the moving image.

Lunch Break features 42 workers as they take their midday break in a corridor stretching nearly the entire shipyard.

Lunch Break features 42 workers as they take their midday break in a corridor stretching nearly the entire shipyard.

Five static shots of workers leaving a factory. Filmed in the spirit of the Lumiere Brothers.

Set in a small town in the Sierra Nevadas, Pine Flat is a look at youth and a meditation on nature, socialization, and solitude.

Set in a small town in the Sierra Nevadas, Pine Flat is a look at youth and a meditation on nature, socialization, and solitude.

Filmed in real time and from a fixed camera angle, No creates a visual choreography from an everyday action. A Japanese peasant couple is bundling hay and later spreads it out again over the field. This action, which occurs in linear geometric precision from back to front and vice versa, ensures an observation of the landscape, perspective, light, and time. Lockhart’s work emerges as a landscape painting in real time.

Teatro Amazonas is an elaborate, intriguing formalist experiment investigating the cinematic gaze and cultural exchange, and offering an unconventional ethnographic record of its Amazonian subjects engaged (and disengaged) in the act of spectatorship.

This non-narrative film depicts the routines of a girls' basketball team in a junior high school near Tokyo. Shot with a stationary camera, it consists of six ten-minute segments, some of which show the girls' routine exercises, others of which are choreographed.

Sharon Lockhart's debut film from 1994 is divided into three parts. All parts are linked in showing the progression of a devastating skin disease of two ten-year-old boys which is successively revealed to be the progression of a skilfully applied special effects make-up. Shot against coloured backdrops, the first sections show portraits of the boys who are introduced by preceding titles as Khalil and Shaun. The third section is a dramatic sequence based on one of the last scenes in John Cassavetes's film A Woman Under the Influence (1974). Lockhart refrains from reproducing the scene literally. Instead, she places and collapses several moments into one, amplifying the main theme of the film - the attempt to pretend that everything is okay. Shaun is presented with his face horribly disfigured by blisters and wounds. His mother's pledges of future happiness thus become rather ominous.