Sharon Lockhart: Perilous Life

This exhibition features film, photography, and sculpture that bookend American artist Sharon Lockhart’s 10-year engagement with a group of children in Poland. The film Pódworka (2009) marks Lockhart’s first encounter with the Polish landscape and the children who inhabit it. A series of fleeting interludes within city life in Łódź, Pódworka is both a study of a specific place and an evocation of children’s resourcefulness.

Among the children Lockhart met was a young girl, Milena, who became a friend and collaborator over the next decade. It was through Milena’s desire to tell her own story that Lockhart began working with a group of young women in the Center for Sociotherapy in Rudzienko, where she created a series of workshops and projects empowering them to find their own voices. As Milena moved from adolescence to adulthood, she remained close with the artist. Made a decade after the two first met in the courtyards of Łódź, the elegiac photographic still life portrait Milena (2020) and the bronze sculpture Untitled (Siblings) (2020) pay homage to Milena in the wake of her passing, denoting both the passage and the fixing of time. Perilous Life captures the enduring power of love and the fragility of life.