The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol, the North American premiere of Sharon Lockhart’s latest body of work, on view June 4 – September 9,2012.
Sharon Lockhart Umbrella Flower Noa Eshkol 1970s Wool, cotton, corduroy and nylon Noa Eshkol Foundation for Movement Notation, Holon, Israel
In this exhibition, co-organized by LACMA and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Lockhart considers the legacy of Noa Eshkol, the noted Israeli dance composer, theorist, and textile artist who created an innovative notation system capable of describing virtually every perceptible movement of the body. Conceived as a two-person exhibition, Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol presents Eshkol’s largely unknown achievements through a new five-channel film installation, a series of photographs, and a selection of Eshkol’s carpets, scores, and archival drawings. This exhibition opened at the Israel Museum in December 2011 and will travel after its presentation at LACMA to the Jewish Museum in New York.
Presented on the 2nd floor of BCAM, Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol explores aspects of Eshkol’s extraordinary practice through several mediums. In Lockhart’s five-channel film installation Five Dances and Nine Wall Carpets by Noa Eshkol (2011), five of Eshkol’s dances are performed by seven dancers. During her research trips to Israel, Lockhart closely followed the work of these dancers, who continue to practice and keep Eshkol’s work alive at her former home-studio in Holon, now the Noa Eshkol Foundation for Movement Notation.
Through her work with photography and film, Los Angeles–based artist Sharon Lockhart (b. 1964) captures intimate quotidian moments from a wide range of communities. Lockhart’s in-depth exploration of her subjects allows her to discern patterns and rhythms that she distills through her art. It was during a research trip to Israel in 2008 that she first encountered the work of Israeli artist Noa Eshkol (1924-2007). In the 1950s, together with architect Avraham Wachman, Eshkol developed a wholly original movement notation system known as Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation (EWMN), which uses symbols and numbers to express the spatial relationships between the parts of the body, both in stasis and in motion. Eshkol devoted her life to perfecting the system, which has been applied in dance as well as in many scientific fields. Because she preferred to work in isolation, Eshkol’s work in modern dance is little known outside of Israel. In an effort to share this pivotal work with a larger audience, Lockhart captured Eshkol’s aging students and a new generation of dancers performing the artist’s original choreography.
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