SHARON LOCKHART

Time – left to itself – is the essence of the urban and landscape tableaux that Sharon Lockhart captures with her fixed camera and patient eye: two girls slow dancing without music in a sparse room with peeling paint; a boy practising his soccer moves over and over again in a backyard; two girls on a forest floor talking about God and free will. Intimacy, curiosity and empathy slowly arise within the stoic frame. For over a decade, the Los Angeles-based artist has returned again and again to her young protagonists in Poland, becoming their advocate, documentarian, confidante and even the representative of their country at the 2017 Venice Biennale. In the US, Lockhart has immersed herself – with an insistent observation that entrances the viewer – in complex dance exercises, physical labour and even the introverted lunch break.

Interview by Claudia SteinbergPortrait by James Benning

Claudia Steinberg Your new film EVENTIDE allows the viewer to participate in an amazing celestial event, the annual Perseid meteor shower over Gotland. Yet it does not only provide a view of the slowly darkening sky and the appearance of the stars; there are also people using phone lights to search or study the grounds and the water intently, turned away from the spectacle above, as if they were urgently looking for something lost. Their activities highlight parts of the environment that we would otherwise not see in the dark and add a sense of mystery, even bewilderment. In 2009, you made a film with a related title, Double Tide, where a female clamdigger similarly bends over to dig in the mud, seemingly oblivious to sunrise and sunset. It has been described as part of your investigation into work. Is there a relationship to EVENTIDE?

Sharon Lockhart I definitely was thinking about Double Tide in Gotland. I like what you said about the figures featured in both films not paying attention to what we normally consider attention-worthy. Both films are about being immersed in a task: one is labour, the other is more ambiguous. My initial idea for Double Tide was to explore a specific kind of labour, but it also had a lot to do with the clammer’s primitive relationship to her environment. At one point in the film, an egret performs essentially the same action as the clammer. Both egret and clamdigger interpret nature’s signs and rhythms to locate their prey. In this way, the clammer becomes part of her environment. As viewers, we cannot see what she sees. We have a different relationship to the landscape than she does and are more likely to look up than down. Our attention is on the clamdigger and we might not even notice the slowly shifting tide until the change is dramatic.For EVENTIDE, I saw the figures as being somehow alien to the environment, exploring it as if it were new to them. They are using technology – cell-phone lights – to help them examine the landscape, putting them in a similar position to the viewer. The figures in both films might not notice the exceptional state of the sky: for the clamdigger, because it is a part of her world; and, for the figures in EVENTIDE, because everything has a quality of newness. For viewers of EVENTIDE, the sky is the most obvious marker of the passage of time. The shift from light to dark, revealing more and more stars, establishes the overall duration of the film. It is a slow, almost imperceptible change, more visible in retrospect than from moment to moment. The occasional and deliberate motions of satellites generate a more visible and predictable clock as they move across the sky. These two markers of duration are then periodically set ajar by the startling and unpredictable streaks of meteors as the small pieces of rock are pulled into the earth’s atmosphere by gravity and subsequently end their journey in a flash as they burn up. The meteors are part of an annual cosmic event as the earth’s orbit passes through the trail of debris shed by Comet Swift-Tuttle in its own 162-year orbit around the sun.

CS In addition to the film, your recent show at Gladstone Gallery in New York presents several large, very dark canvases that you created using a dual process of applying to the canvas dye and layers of cyanotype – a simple photographic process that only requires basic chemicals and daylight to capture an image – in order to create a media hybrid. Only traces of the cyan are visible on the almost pitch-black of the surface, like the last remnants of blue on the night sky. Did it matter to you that the cyanotype was discovered by an astronomer, Sir John Herschel, who practically spent all his nights on Earth watching the sky? And do you think of these canvases also as containers of time?
SL Yes, to both. When we were making EVENTIDE, we worked with an astronomer who informed us about the stars, constellations and meteor showers. Gotland was full of cosmic beauty. During post-production of the film, I was thinking about darkness and its relationship to time and presence in painting. Coming from photography, I knew about Herschel and his contributions to the medium, and cyanotype fitted perfectly. I see the cyanotype paintings as containers of light, as well as of time. Over the course of their construction, each has converted many hours of sunlight into achieving the visual quality of darkness. We coated, exposed, recoated and re-exposed each canvas over 20 times. Each exposure was between two and four hours, so some of them have over 100 hours of light chemically stored in their surface. Viewing the paintings is a durational act: the longer you look, the more you are able to perceive.

CS Mike Kelley was a mentor to you, and at your current show you devote a memorial to him.
SL Mike was great at finding solutions in unexpected places, in often overlooked or underappreciated artistic activities. I think one of the great things he taught me was to look for visual solutions in as many places as I could. The whisky jugs I used for the photograph are a great example. They are utilitarian ceramics; their elegance is at once resonant with minimalism and ideologically opposed to the fetishisations of that movement. They are resolutely imperfect and hand-made. Their purpose – to hold a substance that undermines social control – would not have been lost on Mike. I created bronzes from both the intact and broken jugs as a way of bringing to mind the dualities of permanence and impermanence, containment and entropy, the perfect and imperfect. Over the last few years, I’ve been honouring people I’ve lost in photographs and sculptures. Mike had an interesting take on memorials; he favoured the small gestures we make towards memorialising in everyday life, rather than the grand traditional gestures made on behalf of the state. His Memory Ware works are an example; I see them as anti-memorials. In my own work, I have been collaborating with an ikebana artist to create arrangements of both plants and sculptural objects that honour the person. For Mike, I started with the jugs and then progressed to the idea of a spill or explosion, something that questioned the typical sense of order that Mike always worked against.

CS In Lunch Break, the workers’ slowed-down, almost sedated movements translate into a sense of dejection and exhaustion; there is great melancholy in their sluggish bodies. Is that part of your message? Does the declaration bring out emotions – as Robert Wilson has suggested – that would not be perceptible at regular speed?
SL It wasn’t my intention to convey that sense of melancholy. I wanted to give viewers time to look at and think about that space and the workers that inhabit it. For me, it was an exhilarating experience to get to know those workers and understand how they occupied their workplace. Although it is an unappealing place to some, they made it their home in defiance of management. I see the slowness as a comment on time and their hard-won fight for the 30-minute lunch break, as the film giving them literally more time or figuratively more attention. When the workers saw the film installation, they appreciated the idea and approach of realism.

Film still from Sharon Lockhart, Double Tide, 2009