FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Opening reception: Friday, March 6, 6-9 pm

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce the third solo show of photographs by Los Angeles-based artist Sharon Lockhart. The opening reception is on Friday, March 6 from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibition continues through April 4.

Sharon Lockhart will present Goshogaoka Girls Basketball Team, a new series of 12 photographs which were produced in conjunction with Goshogaoka, a 16mm film. The photographs, broken up into 4 groupings and three sizes, are portraits of a Japanese girls basketball team. Based on the popular genre of sports photography, the groupings are studies in the nature of stop-motion photography and its ability to capture a specific moment. Aside from formal and visual relationships from image to image, each of the groupings addresses a different visual activity: the gestural, the abstract, and the objective document, and the highlight. Whereas the camera in Goshogaoka remains fixed in one place the entire film, the viewpoint is constantly changing in Goshogaoka Girls Basketball Team, creating visual movement around the gym as well as around the players.

Goshogaoka:

"Filmed in a middle school gymnasium in suburban Japan, the film Goshogaoka takes as its ostensible subject the exercise routines and drills of a girls basketball team. The film consists of six ten-minute takes, shot with a fixed camera at court level in which the various cadences of chanting voices and bodily movements digress into distinct studies. Taken together they construct a subtle and multi-layered social portrait, a portrait framed within a study of choreographed movement (the routines, etc...) and therefore one in which documentary values soon become inseparable from aesthetic ones. And as there are no games, scrimmages, or barking coaches here, just the girls and their routines, the image is not so much one of contest and gamesmanship but of individuation within a scene of group cooperation. A scene, by the way, where shyness, camera shyness included, goes hand in hand with an odd sense of social comfort."

Tim Martin
September 1997

The Museum of Modern Art's New Directors/New Films Series, in conjunction with the Film Society of Lincoln Center will present the New York premier of Sharon Lockhart's film, Goshogaoka, at the Titus 2 Theatre, at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York on Saturday, March 28, at 4:30 pm and Sunday, March 29 at 6:00 pm. Please call (212) 708-9500 for ticketing information.

For further information, please contact the gallery at info@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.