Coming Up: Sharon Lockhart
Breathing and soft, almost guttural grunts of hard work: these are the sounds that stay with you a few days after viewing Sharon Lockhart's newest film, Double Tide. The immediate experience, though, is sublime visual pleasure. The film follows the work of a woman digging clams at low tide early in the morning and then again at sunset in the same cove on the Maine coast. The morning is foggy, a soft grey landscape; the afternoon features sunset and illuminated clouds. Lockhart's camera remains still throughout the film, framing the woman at a distance and creating an incredibly captivating portrait that unfolds gracefully in real time, a space opening into duration. The LA-based Lockhart has been making these evocative films with specific formal constraints for several years. Pine Flat from 2005 is made up of 12 unmoving 10-minute shots, each of which features the sound and/or images of children from the town of Pine Flat in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Here, too, the effect is dramatic as the details that would normally be lost instead resonate powerfully. More recently, Lockhart has studied workers in Maine, with Lunch Break and Exit, both of which were shot at the Bath Iron Works shipyard earlier this year. Lockhart, who is on the faculty of the Art School at USC, invites us to reconsider cinema with these projects by paring it back to an essential core, leaving room for us to think.
the details:
Double Tide
Thur., Nov. 19, 7:00 p.m.
Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Blvd., LA