Closing soon: Sharon Lockhart's Lunch Break installation at SFMOMA, photographs and a film that provide documentation of the year Lockhart spent with industrial workers at the Bath Iron Works in Maine. The museum has been celebrating the last weeks of her exhibition with special events including a pop-up lunch room at SFMOMA on Friday (the vegan duck banh mi from Rice Paper Scissors was out of this world, as was Blue Bottle's homemade crackerjack) and a short series of Lockhart's films. Thursday night I attended the first half of her 2005 film Pine Flat before running off to John Wiese's show at The Lab, but the part I saw was wonderfully meditative. Really just a sequence of extended shots in which very little happens (people started sneaking out of the theater after about fifteen minutes), Pine Flat focuses on adolescents who are growing up in the foothills of the Sierras, catching them at that poignant moment in between youth and adulthood. The settings are pastoral and recall classical figure painting as Lockhart's subjects find ways to pass the time, some with patience and others exhibiting a more restless spirit. For more Lockhart this coming Thursday SFMOMA will be showing two more of her films, Podworka and No, or just head up to the museum's fourth floor to experience Lunch Break.
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