Anne Hardy

Modern Art Oxford / FIELD

7th November 2015 – 10th January 2016

Solo exhibition – New commission

In the exhibition FIELD at Modern Art Oxford, Hardy occupied three distinct spaces. In the first were two installations *1 with the larger delineated by a vast expanse of cyan blue carpeting that left the floor to stretch up into flat curtain-walls at either end, creating an enclosure within the gallery. Entitled Pitch Black, a smooth echo / A scoop with a shelter (2015), this work, with the ‘scoop’ of carpet, in turn contained a large, raised, and irregularly-shaped wooden structure, described by the artist as “a free-floating architectural object”.

Beyond the blue carpet ‘scoop’, the second gallery housed a parallel but different kind of document: a group of photograms of what Hardy describes as “process materials”, swept up from her studio floor. The third gallery was converted into a glorious yellow-gold cell, a work entitled An Abandonment was accountable for the Accumulation of Acid After Dark / Punctuated Remains (2015). The room, the floor and walls of which were clad with the same vivid yellow-gold carpeting, was populated with various materials, sound and an array of objects

“…(a) constant hovering between depiction and abstraction— between a storytelling or scene-setting endeavour and a compositional exercise — is the very heart of Hardy’s practice, and is perfectly encapsulated in one element of the installation in Oxford: the curtain of black tapes, which is in fact VHS cassette tape, containing unknown films, deployed as much for its inky blackness as for its suggestion of story. “

Extract from : Katrina Brown, “Anne Hardy”, Fieldworks, TWIN FIELDS, FIELD, pub. The Common Guild and Dent-de-Leone, 2015

*1.

Various terms have been used to describe Hardy’s FIELD works, none quite fully accurate. They
are not installations, sculptural environments, structures, or sculptures but have something of each of these. It is true that they tend to occupy entire spaces, whatever the scale of the exhibition space. Declan Long has perhaps best described them as “curious, quasi-theatrical sets”, “quietly edgy fictional environments”, “detailed, life-size mock-ups of mysterious, imaginary interiors” and “rudimentary rooms within rooms” (Artforum, November 2015) all of which seem more apt than any existent terminology or more succinct phrasing.

List of artworks –

Title: An Abandonment was accountable for the Accumulation of Acid After Dark / Punctuated Remains (2015)