Sharon Lockhart at Friedrich Petzel - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, April, 1995 by Anastasia Aukeman

Los Angeles photographer Sharon Lockhart's first solo show in New York consisted of three groupings of work, most notably a series called "Auditions." In each of five large Ektacolor prints, a boy and a girl aged eight to eleven embrace in a tentative first kiss. The photos are not artificially lit or obviously styled, and have a direct, notational quality. In fact, the shots were designed by the photographer as a restaging of a sequence from Truffaut's 1976 film Small Change.

At first glance, the photos suggest youthful sweetness and innocence. But in a culture saturated with reports of sexual abuse, we can't help noticing that the pictures suggest a degree of coercion. In four of the five photos the girl turns her face away from the boy's kiss, and in two she keeps her arms to her sides while he grips her shoulder or forearm. In Audition Five: Sirushi and Victor, Sirushi's muscles tense visibly. Are we meant to see this merely as a sign of childish insecurity? Even more sinister is the total passivity of the girl Darija who, in Audition Two: Darija and Daniel, gazes blankly past Daniel's shoulder as he kisses her on the cheek.

In these pictures, the mood shifts subtly between playfulness and anxiety. Kids like to kiss; kissing is serious business. In the end, though, Lockhart's role as something other than a neutral observer--as producer, voyeur or even exploiter--remains unexamined.

Lockhart's other works shown here also explore childhood anxieties. Shaun consists of five 6-by-9-inch photographs that show a young boy in white briefs who is covered with a rash of boils and lesions. (Though convincing, the skin condition is the creation of a make-up artist. With each successive picture the lesions spread from his face to his stomach to his legs. Nevertheless the boy gazes confidently at the viewer. Julia Thomas is a diptych showing a young girl and boy on a wooded country path with their backs to the viewer. Here Lockhart evokes W. Eugene Smith's famous 1946 photo The Walk to Paradise Garden. Admittedly cliched, the images nonetheless resonate with mystery. The two kids face an uncertain world on their own, standing half in shadow, half in sunlight, caught in a moment of transformation.