Frank Peter John Dick

K8 Hardy’s work riffs on pop culture and all the images we encounter as consumers. The art she exhibits are photographs and sculptures, but part of her process is gathering masses of images from disparate sources and obsessively collaging them together. In a sense, these collages are edits of photos torn from magazines, printed advertisements, and other visual imagery that Hardy finds compelling. Yet they also include her darkroom test strips and snapshots found at the junk store. These collages were never originally intended for exhibition or print, but merely research for the artist’s work. It was only after a few people saw them in her studio that she was encouraged to show them. For this reason, the collages are powerful and weighty; each is it’s own essay. Hardy has made visual examinations that deal with complicated ideas, issues of representation, phenomenon in style, and playful contemplations of fashion.

K8 Hardy (USA, b. 1977) is a New York-based artist who mines popular culture for material and has no regard for originality. She has no allegiance to any particular medium, but performance is a thread that weaves through her body of work. Hardy eschews virtuosity to craft and is currently exploiting photography. She believes in the power of flamboyant and bold gestures, and the conversations of play, which come across in her endeavors toward total expression. The surface is often used as a decoy in her work to address the political conditions of its production. She has recently been working on a series of photographs called the “Position Series” that employ the tropes of self-portraiture and abstract photography. Hardy is a founding member of the queer feminist journal and artist collective, LTTR. She has shown internationally at spaces including: Reena Spaulings Fine Art, NY; The Tate Modern, London; Artist Space, NY: Galerie BaliceHertling, Paris; Galerie Sonja Junkers, Munich; PS1 MOMA, NY; Higher Pictures, NY; Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts, Heerlen, NL; and the Brooklyn Museum, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, NY.