Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol at The Jewish Museum, New York

Sharon Lockhart’s latest body of work Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol, will be exhibiting at The Jewish Museum from 2 November through to 24 March 2013. In this exhibition, co-organised by the Los Angeles Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Israel Museum, Lockhart engages the legacy of Noa Eshkol, the Israeli dance composer, theorist, and textile artist who created an innovative notation system that describes virtually every perceptible movement of the body. Conceived by Lockhart as a two-person exhibition, Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol consists of a new, large-scale, five-channel film installation, series of photographs and architectural interventions by Lockhart, and a selection of Eshkol’s carpets, scores, and archival drawings.

Presented on the first and third floors of The Jewish Museum, Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol explores aspects of Eshkol’s extraordinary practice through several mediums. For the five-channel installation Five Dances and Nine Wall Carpets by Noa Eshkol (2011), Lockhart filmed seven dancers in various combinations performing five compositions by Eshkol, each set against a selection of Eshkol’s “wall carpets,” or textile works. The concepts behind Eshkol’s dances are illustrated by spherical models made of wire and mesh, which Eshkol constructed as a teaching aid for the notation method. A series of still photographs by Lockhart documents these objects and conveys the logic of movement they are meant to illustrate in groupings of two to five prints. The film installation and photographic series are accompanied by a selection of documents, notes, and drawings from Eshkol’s archive, shedding light on particular aspects of her creative process.

In the exhibition’s final gallery, Lockhart is installing two vibrant examples of Eshkol’s work as a textile artist. The “wall carpets,” as Eshkol called them, were assembled without cutting any new material, using only found scraps of fabric. The dancers participated by sorting the scraps and sewing the final arrangements. Eventually some 500 wall carpets were created, representing a substantial aspect of Eshkol’s oeuvre. Lockhart’s five-channel film marks the first occasion in which Eshkol’s work in movement and textiles is brought together.

The exhibition creates an encounter between the two artists that explores the nature of artistic practice, its preservation, and its interpretation, as well as the experience and representation of space, time, and movement.

Sharon Lockhart, 2 November until 24 March 2013, The Jewish Museum, 1109 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10128. www.thejewishmuseum.org

Credits:

Sharon Lockhart, production still from Five Dances and Nine Wall Carpets by Noa Eshkol, 2011. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. © Sharon Lockhart, 2012.