Tommy, 2015, dye-sublimation print on aluminum and painted iron. Courtesy the artist.
Tommy juxtaposes the form of a “sticking tommy” candle holder, used in the late 1800s by coal miners, with another makeshift holder found in a meme of a boy who has inventively repurposed a glass table as a shelf to hold his smartphone, so he can lie under it to watch a streaming movie, hands-free. The image of the boy—printed here using the digital dye-sublimation method on a smartphone-sized aluminum plate—went viral around the time Sylvia Hardy’s sculpture was first shown in public. Now, in its static material form, removed from social media, Tommy is only “reposted” as a singular, antiquated metal object on the museum’s (real) “wall.” With this work, Hardy comments on the way our relationship to images has drastically changed. The fleeting and multiplicitous digital or viral image acts as a counterpoint to the physical fixity of this lone print and its holder.
Sylvia Hardy received an MFA from Parsons, The New School for Design, New York (2012) and a BFA from Washington University, St. Louis, MO (2007). She has had a solo exhibition at FXFOWLE, New York (2015) and been included in group shows at Rema Hort Mann Foundation, New York (2015), Sydhavnen Station, Copenhagen, Denmark (2013), Spazio Morris, Milan, Italy (2013), and Brennen & Griffin, New York (2013). She collaborated on a publication through Triple Canopy (2013) and received a Danish Arts Council grant (2013).