Chock
The Barbara Walters Gallery at Sarah Lawrence College is pleased to present Dave Hardy, Dave Hardy, a solo exhibition by guest faculty member Dave Hardy. The exhibition will be open from January 31 - March 12 at the gallery’s location in the Heimbold Visual Arts Center.
Dave Hardy constructs architectonic assemblages that defy gravity and time using everyday materials; sheets of glass salvaged from city streets, cement, cushion foam, and other materials left behind. Hardy is known to include such objects as writing implements and tourist tchotchkes to punctuate his sculptures with moments of sentiment and vulnerability. As Hardy writes, in his work “humor undermines the seriousness of material forms to evoke a sense of pathos.”
In Chock, lengths of foam have been soaked in pink paint and wedged between sheets of glass in dripping, intestine-like folds. A longer piece of dark foam winds between the panels, one end lackadaisically dangling toward the ground in a gesture that anthropomorphizes the otherwise abstract sculpture. The foam seems to be on the constant verge of expanding and sending the sheets of glass crashing to the ground. The structure rests on a glass pedestal, which heightens the thrilling tension between apparent precariousness and actual stability.
Mountain also explores visual instability and fragility in Hardy’s sculptural language of sophisticated dirtiness. Sheets of glass lean against each other in self-supporting triangles, reminiscent of a house of cards in both their form and the sense of imminent and inevitable collapse. The panels dig into a foam base as the entire structure leans. Cernuous coils of foam rest on top of the glass, appearing impossibly heavy for their supports, which include a charmingly unexpected neon pink highlighter.
Hardy manipulates his contradictory materials without visible supports, imbuing his sculptures with an insouciant, devil-may-care attitude. While the works on view at Dave Hardy, Dave Hardy are intensely based in the specificity of their materials, their poetic formalism simultaneously offers a plethora of conceptual readings.
Dave Hardy (b. 1969, Sharon, CT) earned a BA from Brown University, Providence, RI in 1992, a MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT in 2004, and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME in 2004. He has had solo shows at at Galerie Jeanroch Dard, Brussels, Belgium (2016), Wentrup gallery, Berlin, Germany (2014), Churner and Churner, New York, NY (2014), Regina Rex, Queens, NY (2013), and group shows at Tibor De Nagy, New York, NY (2016), Invisible Exports, New York, NY (2015), Bortolami, NY (2014), and Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York, NY (2014). His work was also included in the Queens International Exhibition at the Queens Museum in New York (2016) and Greater New York 2005 at MoMA/PS1, New York. His awards include the Teaching Excellence Award from the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University, New York, NY (2013), Outstanding Faculty Award, presented by Steinhardt Undergraduate Student Government, New York University, New York, NY (2012), New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Crafts/ Sculpture (2011), and Emerging Artist Fellowship, Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY (2005).