calendario eventi  :: 

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4/2/2010

Three exhibitions

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis

Sharon Lockhart
Lunch Break

Los Angeles-based conceptual artist Sharon Lockhart creates films and photographs that are at once rigorously formal and deeply humanistic, meticulously observing the details of everyday life while also probing the limits and intersections between the two mediums.

As much as Lockhart's photographs reveal cinematic qualities of staging and casting, so, too, do her films frequently engage a static camera and angles that recall photographic practices.
Beginning Friday, Feb. 5, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will present "Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break," a one-person exhibition showcasing the artist's most recent series.

Inspired by the shifting world economy and its effect on American labor, Lockhart spent a year observing and engaging workers at the Bath Iron Works, a major shipyard and U.S. Navy supplier located in Bath, Maine.

The resulting works, collectively titled "Lunch Break," include two large-scale film installations and three distinct sets of photographs that together explore the daily routines and social activities of workers during their time away from production.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the titular film "Lunch Break," which consists of a single, slow-moving tracking shot down a long and seemingly endless interior corridor. To create the piece, Lockhart recorded a 10-minute walk-through — her first use of a mobile camera — and then employed digital technology to stretch the length to 80 minutes. This extreme slow motion imbues ordinary lunchtime activities — eating, reading, talking and sleeping — with an almost baroque sense of anticipation, yet the film ultimately refuses cathartic narrative closure. The result is a meditative reflection, devoid of sentiment, on aspects of factory life that typically remain hidden from outside view.

By contrast, the second film, "Exit," is divided into five sections — one for each day of the work week — and depicts workers as they depart the complex at the end of their shifts. Employing a static camera, the film recalls Louis Lumiere's historic "Leaving the Lumiere Factory" (1895), a 46-second black-and-white short that is widely considered to be the first true motion picture.

Yet, Lockhart subtly reverses Lumière's viewpoint. Rather than observe workers as they stream toward an exterior camera, she films from within factory grounds, focusing on workers' backs as they seemingly stage their own exits.

The first of the three series of photographs centers on workers' lunch boxes, emphasizing the ways in which stickers, labels, contents and other minute details suggest the personalities of their owners.

A second series is devoted to the independent businesses that exist within the factory — makeshift booths where workers sell hot dogs, coffee and other items to their colleagues. The third series consists of carefully composed images of workers lingering around lunch tables, at once recalling and revising historical traditions of group portraiture.

"Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break" is organized by Sabine Eckmann, Ph.D., director and chief curator of the Kemper Art Museum. The exhibition will be on view at the Kemper through April 19, then will travel to the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine, where it will be on view July 10-Oct. 17, 2010; and to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it will be on view May 21-Sept. 6, 2011.

Support for "Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break" is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; James M. Kemper Jr.; the David Woods Kemper Memorial Foundation; the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; Helen Kornblum; and members of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

Catalog
A fully illustrated color catalog will accompany the exhibition and will be distributed by the University of Chicago Press. The catalog will include essays by Eckmann, Mark Godfrey and Matthias Michalka, as well as an interview by filmmaker James Benning, in which Sharon Lockhart discusses her creative process, and an interview with architects Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena, conducted by Andras Palffy.

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Allison Smith
Needle Work

curated by Lauren Adams, assistant professor of painting in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

Allison Smith is known for creating large-scale installations that critically engage popular forms of historical reenactment, along with crafts and other traditional cultural conventions, to redo, restage, and refigure historical memories. Her work often draws on "living history" museums, battlegrounds, and most recently the Internet to explore gendered conventions of craft, constructions of national identity, and experiences of violence.

Allison Smith: Needle Work centers on Smith's recreation of European and American gas masks from World War I and World War II. Appearing crudely fashioned, from textiles such as canvas and twill tape as opposed to the more familiar industrial black rubber, these early masks — which Smith first encountered while visiting the Musée de l’Armée in Paris — struck her as meticulously, even lovingly, crafted, yet also functionally inadequate to their task. The exhibition also includes staged photographs in which masks are worn, held or otherwise positioned as props, variously evoking survival, cruelty, modesty, camouflage and disguise. Representing another tradition of wartime needlework are four large silk parachutes — printed by Washington University’s Island Press — suspended from the ceiling.

As the inaugural Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Smith developed Needle Work in conjunction with multiple visits in fall 2009 to participate with Washington University faculty member Lauren Adams in her interdisciplinary course "Past Perfect, Present Tense," which investigated the use of historical research as a strategy within contemporary artistic practice.

Smith is an assistant professor of sculpture at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She has exhibited in venues throughout the US and abroad, including the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams; the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh; the Arario Gallery in Cheonan, South Korea; and the P.S.1 MoMA Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York. In 1999 she earned an MFA from the Yale University School of Art and in 1999-2000 she participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program

Catalog
A fully illustrated color catalog will accompany the exhibition. The catalog includes an essay by Wendy Vogel and interviews with the artist and faculty member Lauren Adams.

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American Indian Art and Iconography

The exhibition brings together over twenty-five art objects and artifacts made by the indigenous peoples of North America. This Teaching Gallery exhibition, drawn from the Museum's permanent collection, explores the ways in which the imagery on the pottery, baskets, stone and metal work, and copper plaques conveys sacred meaning, tells a story, or communicates beliefs while also providing insight into the daily life and rituals of each culture represented. The exhibition is divided into sections based on the strata of the cosmos that the iconography represents—the Upper World, Middle World, or Lower World.

This Teaching Gallery exhibition is presented in conjunction with the course "American Indian Art and Iconography" offered by the Department of Anthropology and University College in spring 2010, and organized collaboratively by Carol Diaz-Granados, research associate in the department of anthropology; James R. Duncan, former director of the Missouri State Museum; and Carol Epstein, member of the National Council of Arts and Sciences.


Image: Sharon Lockhart, still from Lunch Break (Assembly Hall, Bath Iron Works, Bath, Maine), 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

Press contact
Liam Otten ph 314.935.8494 liam_otten@wustl.edu

Opening reception Friday Feb. 5 h 7-9 p.m.
Walk-through with the artist 2 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 6.

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
Washington University in St. Louis, near the intersection of Forsyth and Skinker boulevards.
HOURS: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Thursdays; 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Closed Tuesdays.
Free and open to the public.

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