Hardy constructs interior environments in her London studio from discarded and found materials, creating sculptural installations for the lens. The resulting photographs depict unpopulated worlds in which signs of human use are everywhere – from the patinated surfaces of castoff possession... Read more
Hardy constructs interior environments in her London studio from discarded and found materials, creating sculptural installations for the lens. The resulting photographs depict unpopulated worlds in which signs of human use are everywhere – from the patinated surfaces of castoff possessions to the presence of the artist’s own hand. These carefully staged images imply performances of the everyday and propose a number of spaces dedicated to the less public pursuits of a set of unseen protagonists whose behavior and personality is carried in the accumulation and arrangement of objects and detritus left behind.
There is a tension in these images between the systematic order of controlled experiments and the entropic decay that has overtaken them – a conflict between humanity’s indexical inclinations and an inevitable anarchy. Hardy’s starting point may be a single object or idea, which instigates the gradual evolution of each installation. Like a fiction writer whose characters seem to take on lives of their own, Hardy allows her compositions to develop freely without narrowly defined goals. Acting as both visual composer and oblique storyteller, the artist suggests ambiguous narratives through her deliberately constructed images.
For this exhibition, Hardy presents five recent photographs. Their darker palette depicts a variety of spaces – the basement of a time-worn nightclub, a ravaged recording studio, a subterranean exercise lair, a closet-sized personal firing range, and a wildly cluttered and curlicued lobby with a set of turquoise stairs leading off into the unknown. Hardy’s complex practice makes reference to sculpture, installation and film.
Anne Hardy received an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in 2000, and has since participated in numerous prestigious international exhibitions including solo shows at Maureen Paley, London and Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle. Her work will be featured in the upcoming exhibitions Out of Focus: Photography Now at the Saatchi Gallery, London, and New Photography in Britain at Galleria Civica de Modena, Italy, for which a catalog will be published. Her photograph Outpost (2007) is currently on view in Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art at the Barbican Gallery, London. Hardy was also featured in group exhibitions at the 52nd Venice Biennale, Bregenzer Kunstverein, Austria and Kunsthalle Helsinki, Finland. Her work has been discussed in Vitamin Ph, New Art from London, and The Photograph as Contemporary Art. Hardy lives and works in London.
