sharon lockhart

About

In a grouping of new cyanotype paintings, the artist continues her career-long engagement with the durational and perceptual nature of images, developing her filmic and photographic methodologies further on canvas. Complementing these is new photography and a screening of EVENTIDE (2022). In this contemplative work, created on the shore of Gotland, Sweden, Lockhart captures the gradual shift of dusk to night, in turn expanding this notion of transition to a group of figures moving slowly through the film’s fixed frame.

Based on photographs made during EVENTIDE’s production, Lockhart’s Untitled (Night Sky) (all 2022) and Untitled (Night Sea) (2023) paintings see the artist employ cyanotype chemistry, in concert with fiber-reactive dyes, to create encapsulations of all that night and darkness connote and denote. Occupying a hybrid space between photography and painting, Lockhart adapts the cyanotype process - first introduced in the mid-19th century for use in astronomical research - by hand-applying photographic emulsion over coats of vibrant color. These layers create a delicately modeled image that hovers on the edge of perception, appearing and disappearing as a viewer’s vision adjusts to their play of light and density. As modified landscapes, they challenge the genre’s established conventions and foreground both the processes of making and looking

at images.

These works build upon Lockhart’s filmic practice, subtly drawing out parallels. Conceptually, they reveal the central role of time in both their construction and reception. Like her films, they rely on duration, and reward the extended gaze. In her paintings, richness and depth derive from the emulsion’s repeated exposure to daylight - in certain cases totaling up to 100 hours. Thus, they stand as innately durational - veritable capsules of light as a function of time. They act paradoxically as magnets and vacuums: While their photographic chemistry is designed to absorb and become activated by the visible spectrum, the images themselves emulate an environment devoid of it. Together, the elements of the works stand in balance, evoking the disorienting uncertainty that darkness may bring and the hope of a dawning day that necessarily follows each night.

We are proud to host a screening of EVENTIDE (2022), in which Lockhart visualizes the force of time by means of the gradual disappearance of dusk’s light as it concedes and fades to night. Under a vast expanse of sky, punctuated by streaking meteors or orbiting satellites, a group of figures search the rocky shore with lights in determined, measured movements containing echoes of the artist’s long-standing engagement with choreography. Over the 30-minute take, the search party slowly enters and exits the frame, leaving only a darkened landscape behind. The transitory and provisional nature of human existence is foregrounded through the figures’ absorption in the present, their collective gaze fixed downward while the skies above - a shade of navy nearly mirroring the cyanotype paintings - are resplendent with traces of the past: stars whose light has traveled for eons.

Sharon Lockhart (b. 1964) is currently featured in a group exhibition of works from TBA21’s collection, entitled Remedios: Where new land might grow, on view at Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba until March 31, 2024. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at international museums and institutions including at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao (2021); Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore (2021); Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee (2019); Fondazione Fotografia Modena, Modena (2018); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne (2015); Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2014); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2012); Secession, Vienna (2008); Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2001); and MAK – Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna (2000). Her works have been presented in biennials including at the Polish Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017); the Shanghai Biennale (2014); the Liverpool Biennial (2014); and the Whitney Biennial (1997, 2000, 2004). Sharon Lockhart lives and works in Los Angeles.