Sharon Lockhart / Noa Eshkol

In this multi-channel film installation, Los Angeles-based artist Sharon Lockhart explores the extraordinary work of Noa Eshkol (1924–2007), the Israeli dance composer, theorist, and textile artist whose achievements include the development in the 1950s of a revolutionary dance notation system that categorized movements of the body through numbers and symbols. Although the two women never met—Lockhart only discovered Eshkol’s work during a 2008 trip to Israel—the project is conceived as a two-person exhibition, highlighting a fascinating artistic convergence between past and present, as a contemporary artist activates the work of a modernist composer through her archive. 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 the final work, films of five different dances are projected simultaneously on freestanding walls, allowing visitors to reflect upon their own movement as they traverse the exhibition space. 

Organized by Rose Curator Kim Conaty, Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol was first presented by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.