New Exhibition Sharon Lockhart / Noa Eshkol to Open at Rose Art Museum, 2/12
The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University will present Sharon Lockhart / Noa Eshkol, an exhibition featuring Los Angeles-based artist Sharon Lockhart's collaboration with the extraordinary work of Noa Eshkol (1924-2007), the Israeli dance composer, theorist, and textile artist. The exhibition will be on view February 12-June 5, 2016.
Lockhart's multi-channel film installation Five Dances and Nine Wall Carpets by Noa Eshkol (2011) will fill the Lois Foster Gallery with movement and sound, as Lockhart captures the spirit of Eshkol's work in five films that re-stage the Israeli artist's choreography alongside the boldly patterned "wall carpets" she began making in the early 1970s. Through Lockhart's reimagining and reanimating of Eshkol's achievements, the exhibition highlights a fascinating artistic convergence between past and present, with a contemporary artist activating the work of a modernist composer through her archive.
Lockhart discovered Eshkol's work during a 2008 trip to Israel, one year after Eshkol's death. She was drawn to Eshkol's structural approach to dance and textiles; in both of these parallel practices-which Eshkol herself never presented together-the Israeli composer broke down forms into essential elements that she then recombined in new compositions. While Eshkol's work has been little known outside of Israel, her pioneering theories of movement notation, especially her development with architect Avraham Wachman in the 1950s of the Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation (EWMN) system, bear fascinating parallels with experiments in the scripting of ordinary actions by artists such as Yvonne Rainer and the Judson Dance Theater.
Although the two women never met, Lockhart conceived the project as a two-person exhibition. As she has done in previous photographic series and films, Lockhart engaged deeply and over a period of years in research relating to Eshkol's life and achievements, forming relationships with those who knew her and the communities that surrounded her. Collaborating with Eshkol's students as well as a newer generation of dancers, Lockhart staged and filmed performances of Eshkol's choreography in a minimal, gallery-like setting punctuated only by Eshkol's remarkable wall carpets, rotated from dance to dance like elements in a stage set.
In Five Dances and Nine Wall Carpets by Noa Eshkol (2011), films of five dances performed by seven dancers are projected simultaneously on freestanding sculptural walls positioned throughout the gallery, allowing visitors to reflect upon their own movement as they traverse the exhibition space. According to Rose curator Kim Conaty, "Lockhart's film installation brings performance into the gallery in a fascinating, new way. Granting permanence to the typically ephemeral practice of dance, the project both preserves Eshkol's achievements and reframes her production in the present."
Image Credit: Sharon Lockhart, Five Dances and Nine Wall Carpets by Noa Eshkol, 2011. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels and neugerriemschneider, Berlin
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