Artist:
Sharon Lockhart (born 1964 in Norwood, MA, USA; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA).

Materials:
Five-channel film installation (35mm film transferred to HD); continuous loop.

Description:
“Since the 1990s, Lockhart has memorialized specific, quotidian moments in particular communities using film and photography. She discovered [Israeli dance composer and textile artist Noa] Eshkol’s groundbreaking work during a 2008 trip to Israel. Eshkol is best known for developing in the 1950s, with architect Avraham Wachman, the Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation (EWMN) system, which uses a combination of symbols and numbers to define the motion of any limb around its joint. Eshkol developed a dance practice based upon its simple structures. Lockhart filmed Eshkol’s aging students and a newer generation of dancers performing her choreography in an effort to bring her visionary work to light.”
–Press release, “Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art website.

“Known for a photographic and film practice based on immersive personal relationships she forges with the communities that are her subjects, Sharon Lockhart has moved her collaborative strategy in an affecting new direction with her latest project. Addressing a historical subject for the first time, she investigates the legacy of Israeli choreographer, theorist, and textile artist Noa Eshkol, who in the 1950s innovated a sophisticated system for recording the body in space, known as Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation.

“The juxtapositions Lockhart composes throughout are moving and emotionally rich, introducing an important, if lesser-known, artist to new audiences through an intimate conversation of ideas simulated across the gulf of history. The interlaced bonds of collaboration—between Eshkol and her dancers, between Lockhart and Eshkol, and between Lockhart and Eshkol’s dancers—emerge as the elevated stakes of this art.”
—Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Review: “Sharon Lockhart and Noa Eshkol,” Artforum, 2012.