FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 21, from 6-8 PM.
Opening February 21 through March 28, Blum & Poe will present Sharon Lockhart's “Goshogaoka Girls Basketball Team.” This series of 12 photographs is a conjunctive project to Goshogaoka, Lockhart's new 16mm film completed last year.
Broken up into four parts, these static portraits of a Japanese high school basketball team act as moving stills which compliment the fluidity of the film. These images dynamically and formally confront issues of narrative, performance, dance, portraiture and the ways in which one culture looks at another.
“Some of the most exciting films are those that appear the simplest, and so it is with Goshogaoka, a mesmerizing work that refreshes the eye and ear as it liberates the mind. Not far outside Tokyo, there is Goshogaoka, a suburban junior high school with a girl's basketball team. The team practices. Sharon Lockhart, an American visual artist with an international reputation, attended practice and recorded some of the routines that constitute the workout. Goshogaoka may be read as a pure ethnography, scientific, detached, and calibrated, but that would be missing just about everything there is to enjoy in this most pleasurable film. Goshogaoka deals with truth, beauty (consider the framing and the image), and the idea that a collection of individuals behaving synchronously creates something more, a new entity - the group. The film is enormously subtle and can be appreciated as a mediation on the nature of communal achievement and a covert speculation on cultural differences between Japan the filmmaker's native country. Although there is no narrative, there is surprise and expectation: What will the girls do next? Will they chant or will we hear the hypnotic beat of their running shoes on the polished gymnasium floor? The filming of these girls at the melancholic and awkward moment of adolescence asks the audience to entertain thoughts about change, transience, and biography. I got so caught up in thinking about Goshogaoka that I still find myself meditating on it happily.” - Laurence Kardish
The Museum of Contemporary Art will present the Los Angeles premiere of the film Goshogaoka at the Ahmanson Auditorium on Thursday, February 19 at 6:30 PM, Saturday, February 21 at 3:00 PM and Sunday, February 22 at 3:00 PM.
A publication will be available. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10:30 AM – 6 PM. If you have any questions please contact Timothy Blum or Jeffrey Poe at 310 453 8311.