Sharon Lockhart, Harold Edgerton, and Alex Katz

Alex Katz once described the settings for his night paintings—the woods in Maine, New York industrial buildings at dusk—as “armatures for the light.” Katz has made these paintings for the past four decades, and each work is a study in the subtlety of illumination and the quietude of spaces depicted through shadows and silhouettes. The final exhibition for Sharon Lockhart’s season at The Artist’s Institute takes darkness as a point of departure, bringing together a night painting from Katz’s personal collection with the pioneering flash photography of Harold Edgerton, two artists whose works have been touchstones for Sharon’s latest series of photographs.

For the past several years, Sharon has hosted retreats in a rural area south of Warsaw with teenage women from the Youth Centre for Sociotherapy in Rudzienko. The retreats are a break from the regimented schedules of the teens’ institutional lives, and the activities focus on finding one’s own voice. There are workshops in creative writing, philosophy, music, and dance, as well as time set aside for journal writing, field walks, and group dinners with conversation late into the night. Sharon’s new body of work documents three of the young women at the edge of the woods after a class in improvisational movement. Its title, When You're Free, You Run in the Dark, comes from an observation one of the teens made to Sharon in a letter about her time in the countryside—a place where self-expression, illumination, and escape comingle.