Sharon Lockhart

At once formally rigorous and socially perceptive, Sharon Lockhart’s complex and careful investigations into the mediums of film and photography probe the limits and intersections of both. For Lunch Break (2008), Lockhart spent a year at a naval shipbuilding plant in Maine, observing and engaging with workers during their daily routines. The photographs and film installation presented in this exhibition contemplate workers’ activities during their time off from production, bringing into view everyday situations that typically escape our collective attention. Lockhart’s work is completely unsentimental yet deeply humane, focused on mundane details yet grounded in a contemporary political and economic reality: the decline of the American industrial working class in the context of 21st-century global capitalism. Offered in conjunction with the exhibition, the newspaper The Lunch Break Times — Bay Area Edition will relate stories about labor and lunch breaks.