NEW YORK, NY.- The Jewish Museum presents The Line and the Circle by Sharone Lifschitz, a video installation, from February 11 to August 21, 2011 in the Museum’s Barbara and E. Robert Goodkind Media Center.
In this video (19 min. 26 sec.), Sharone Lifschitz documents a two-week period she spent working with her mother in February 2009. Returning together to the darkroom for the first time in more than twenty years, mother and daughter printed fourteen images, selected by the artist and taken by her mother and other members of Kibbutz Nir Oz. The photographs, made between 1959 and the early 1980s, depict life in a community whose socialist values represent a particular moment in Israel's history.
The printing of the images is itself an act of nostalgia, since digital photography has made such work almost obsolete. The process followed by the two women shapes a conversation through both content and ritual and the photographs become a catalyst for a new understanding to emerge--between parent and child, artist and artist, past and present. The video is a meditation on the vanishing space of the photographic darkroom and the demise of a socialist utopia Lifschitz’s mother tried to create.
London-based artist Sharone Lifschitz was born in Israel and grew up in Kibbutz Nir Oz. Trained as an architect at the Architectural Association, London, and as a visiting student to the Architectural Department of the Cooper Union, New York, she left architecture for the visual arts in 2000, completing her MA in Fine Art in 2002 at Central St. Martins, London. Lifschitz’s work has been shown in group exhibitions in London, Buenos Aires, Minneapolis, Luxembourg, and New York. In 2005, her work was included in Dreams and Trauma, an Israeli film festival, and in an exhibition at Berlin’s House of World Cultures. Her work can be found in private and public collections, including the Jewish Museum Munich, Lenbachhaus Munich and the Great Eastern Hotel, London.
An afternoon gallery talk by Sharone Lifschitz will be offered at The Jewish Museum on Tuesday, March 8 at 2 pm. The gallery talk is FREE with admission to The Jewish Museum.
