Sharon Lockhart. Milena Milena. A Work in Progress

Sharon Lockhart, born in 1964 in Norwood, Massachusetts, is an American artist and filmmaker.
Her work has been shown at numerous exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Japan. For the past two decades, Lockhart has portrayed individuals and their communities, showing aspects of their everyday lives in moving and still photography. She belongs to a generation of artists who, during the 1990s, turned their attention to the everyday, to the subjective, the human. In her practice, Lockhart often illuminates the forgotten and the overlooked.
Her working process involves long periods of research in a given location, where she familiarizes herself with the local community, often forging deep friendships and initiating a strong collaboration.
Milena, Milena is the second exhibition in a trilogy based on Lockhart's portrait of Polish teenager Milena - a story about the difficulty of leaving childhood behind and facing adulthood. Sharon Lockhart first met Milena in 2009 in ?ód?, Poland, when the girl was nine-years old.
Lockhart gravitated towards Milena's strong personality, and the two soon developed a friendship through the act of play. When Lockhart was invited to stage an exhibition in Warsaw a few years later, she rekindled her friendship with Milena, and discovered Milena's profound desire to write an autobiography about her life. Triggering an ongoing collaboration between Lockhart and Milena, the imagined autobiography has been the impetus through which the two have explored artistic expression together.