Since her earliest works in the mid 1990s, the photographer and filmmaker Sharon Lockhart has engaged strategies of restaging and reenacting, drawing on a variety of sources from historical American photographs, to family snapshots, to the films of French new wave. Lockhart’s work is made in part in the negotiation between her visual and narrative sources and the actors—most often children—who re-enact them. Increasingly, in films from Pine Flat (2005) to Rudzienko (2016), she has drawn on the long visual history of the pastoral tradition and its possibilities. Taking the term as both a literary and pictorial genre and a critical opening, this paper will use the pastoral to draw out and weave together a number of Lockhart’s recurring themes and images: the landscape and the cinematic tableau, children’s time and film time, and labor and leisure.
Howard Singerman is the Phyllis and Joseph Caroff Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Hunter College, and the author of Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (1999) and Art History, after Sherrie Levine (2012). He has contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogues, among them A Forest of Signs and Public Offerings, both at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where he was Museum Editor from 1985 to 1988. His essays have appeared in a number of journals including Artforum, October, Oxford Art Journal, and La Part de l’Oeil.
Funding provided through the Humanities & Arts Discovery Theme Focus Area “Contemporary Art and Its Publics”
