WINDWARD (2025), Sharon Lockhart
- Yuehe (Leon) Zhang
- Feb 2
- 5 min read
Edited By Drew Zihan Tang
In October we visited the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the Walter Phillips Gallery that hosted a new film installation WINDWARD (2025) by Sharon Lockhart. Filmed on Fogo Island, Lockhart explores a place and how people, in this case youth, engage with landscapes via extended static takes. The Fogo Islands are located off the northern coast of Newfoundland in Canada. Sharon Lockhart is an American multidisciplinary artist who creates installations, photography, film, painting, and sculptures to create compelling stories of the histories she encouncers and people she meets.
I think this work particularly resists analysis because it is primarily experiential. The viewer sits in darkness, watching alternating long static shots of landscapes accompanied only by natural ambience and the distant sounds of children at play. There is no stable indicator to infer the time spent; time feels fluid and unmeasured. When the film ended, I felt as though I had watched it for roughly thirty minutes, though the actual running time was sixty-five.
The minimal editing and incidental presence of children blurs the boundary between documentary image and lived reality --- except for the absence of any physical sensation of the wind that dominates the soundtrack. Gradually, the film eroded my ordinary thinking pattern that hinges on tasks and objectives. I was given a rare opportunity to attend to the intricacy of the natural environment within prolonged stillness, yet this attentiveness slowly gave way to boredom toward the end. What ultimately remained was a vague residue of calm and fatigue, along with a handful of indistinct landscapes punctuated by children in motion.
Interestingly, the exhibition description frames the work as employing a duration-based approach (National Gallery of Canada), which resonated with my experience. In Bergson’s sense, duration rejects objective clock time in favor of lived continuity, in which past moments persist by continuously transforming into the present. A more explicit account of this concept is provided in the appendix; here, it serves only as a conceptual backdrop for articulating how the work was undergone.
Let’s recall that Sharon Lockhart is an American visual artist working with film, photography, and installation, known for long fixed camera works that foreground everyday activity and the social conditions of specific places. Given Lockhart’s durational approach to attention consistent with her past works and method, this piece implicitly resists direct analysis or detailed articulation. In retrospect, the experience may be better understood as an intentional dissolution of meaning. The exhibition text emphasizes relationships between people and land, suggesting duration as a way of attending to place. From this perspective, it seems WINDWARD doesn’t invite interpretation: the viewer is asked to remain within the environment without actively organizing it into thought. The work indeed offered me no discrete moments to recall or analyze; instead, fixed landscapes and the ordinary movements of children coalesce into a continuous, undifferentiated whole.
For a viewer inclined toward interpretation, however, this position is not entirely comfortable. This was particularly true given I was on an exploratory trip implicitly for the Hart House Collection to survey the art landscapes in different parts of Canada: I was kept wide awake by the obligation to survey Calgary’s art landscape for the acquisition process during our trip. In searching for meaning, I found myself scrutinizing details --- the ebb and flow of grass on a hillside, the speed and texture of the wind, and the proportions of the landscape. The experience was analogous to lowering a noise gate while simultaneously raising input gain in audio recording: sensory information accumulates until it becomes overwhelming, and fatigue sets in. The film’s extended stillness and lack of narrative progression stretch attention to the point where its usual orientation toward purpose and outcome loosens. Boredom thus appears integral and intended for this process. As the viewer continues to watch while the expectation thins, one enters a state closer to endurance rather than any form of comprehension or realization. Landscapes cease to function as images to be read, and human presence no longer organizes itself around intention.
Seen in this way, Lockhart’s durational approach in WINDWARD presents the connection between people and place on Fogo Island yet simultaneously weakens our impulse to define them, making this connection precede any explanation. It leaves behind an experience that resists articulation yet lingers as a reminder of how our presence can briefly co-integrate with the surrounding environment when the sense of purpose fades. From this perspective, I think the film can be enjoyed both as a restrained documentary about children on Fogo Island and as an experiment inducing altered states of attention.
Appendix
To make the concept of duration less elusive, the following is a series of conceptual scaffolds designed to break down, which help clarify the boundaries of the concept. Let us begin with the model of clock time that Bergson criticizes. Within this conventional framework, we fix the present moment as if the world were momentarily frozen. Call this moment t, and extract a simple feature of consciousness --- say, the dryness felt on our lips --- denoted d_t. Sampling this feature at regular intervals like minutes into the past yields a sequence D = {d_t, d_(t-1), d_(t-2), d_(t-3), …}, a familiar representation of experience as a series of discrete observations. This simple model provides a useful starting point for modification.
We then generalize this setup by expanding the observed feature into a compound state of consciousness, comprising many loosely defined aspects such as hunger, loneliness, or hope. Let this higher-dimensional state and its history be denoted X = {x_t, x_(t-1), x_(t-2), x_(t-3), …}. The components of X need not be fixed, reflecting the fluidity of attention. Importantly, let each state be understood as the result of arbitrary transformations of earlier ones, allowing past moments to interpenetrate rather than merely succeed one another per Bergson.
Next, we let the sampling frequency for past states approach infinity while suspending all notions of clock time. As the interval between states vanishes, X becomes apparently continuous rather than discrete. Temporal indices like t-1 and t-5 retain no meaning except a vague relative deviation from a fixed present. Finally, if we release the fixation on the present moment t and allow the world to resume, even this reference point dissolves. The present becomes transient, continuously collapsing into the past, and no stable “observation” can be identified. At this limit, it becomes pointless to mentally pick up past observations, and the act of treating consciousness as something observable at moments loses its meaning altogether. The simple model then collapses, and what remains is a dense and dynamic past that constantly transforms itself into the flowing present. It becomes abstract and qualitative, which I think is very close to Bergson’s own analogies and explanations for duration.
Yuehe (Leon) Zhang is one of the Acquisition Co-Chairs of the Art Committee, who leads student research and voting for the Hart House collection’s acquisition process, guides gallery tours, and helps coordinate artist talks. He specializes in Financial Economics and does research in international asset pricing.
Sources
Bergson, H. (1889/2002). The idea of duration. In J. Mullarkey & K. Ansell (Eds.), Key writings (pp. 59–94). Bloomsbury Publishing.
National Gallery of Canada. (n.d.). Sharon Lockhart and WINDWARD. National Gallery of Canada. Retrieved January 23, 2026, from https://www.gallery.ca/whats-on/national-engagement/sharon-lockhart-and-windward
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