Exhibitions - Public Setting

Dave Hardy
Public Setting

08.09.17 – 01.21.18

Queens Museum at Bulova Corporate Center

A view of a bank lobby through its glass entrance. The glass has a white, square decal repeated in two rows and its banking hours listed in tiny font. In the center of its tiled floor is a sculpture. On the back wall of the lobby is an office space with two blinds drawn half open and a front desk, booth with dark, wood paneling.

Image: Dave Hardy, That a Dead Man Sings (2014), polyurethane foam, glass, cement, ink, wood, dimensions variable. Photo by Sonny Martinez.

Often using colorful arrangements of salvaged construction materials, Dave Hardy’s rather anthropomorphic sculptures accumulate tension as their disparate materials interact: concrete slabs slump over elongated strips of glass, foam is punctured by a sharpened edge. With its ability to absorb weight and withstand compression, foam is most often used as a filler for car seats, upholstered furniture, and mattresses, to support the human body. But as mutated by Hardy, the foam is solidified into forms and gestures burdened by the additional weight of concrete, so that it signifies something between the body and its inanimate support.

 

This incorporation of raw materials—removed from their common purpose as capital goods—hints at a refusal of industry promoted by corporate spaces, factories and other businesses. Cognizant of this material tension, Hardy’s work has been situated in the Queens Museum’s dedicated gallery at Bulova Corporate Center, surrounded by crystalline glass offices in the historic Art Deco building. Works also infiltrate the Center beyond the gallery space; In the South entrance, a series of conjoined, wall-mounted phone booths delineated by glass panels and stripped of their obsolete payphones, serve as a literal framework for Hardy’s site-specific pieces; a floor-to-ceiling architectonic sculpture has been installed in front of a teller’s desk inside of a vacant office space once belonging to a regional bank. Hardy’s fleshy, abject forms contrast with the stainless steel compartments and meld into the architecture they inhabit.

 

Dave Hardy (b. 1969, Sharon, CT) received his MFA from The Yale School of Art in 2004, his BA from Brown University in 1992, and studied at The Skowhegan School of Painting. He has exhibited in group shows including Make it Now: New Sculpture in New York (The Sculpture Center, NY, 2005), Greater New York (MoMA PS1, NY, 2005), and Un Balance (Jack Shainman Gallery, NY, 2008). He has been featured in solo exhibitions at Churner and Churner, NY; Regina Rex, NY; Wentrup Gallery, Berlin; and most recently Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles. Hardy lives and works in New York.

 

This exhibition is curated by Alessandra Gomez, independent curator, and coordinated with Sophia Marisa Lucas, Assistant Curator, Queens Museum.

 

The Queens Museum at Bulova Corporate Center
75-20 Astoria Boulevard
Jackson Heights, N.Y.  11370
718-446-0757

 

Gallery Hours
Monday – Friday 7 a.m. – 7 p.m.
Saturday – Sunday 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

 

The satellite gallery program at the Bulova Corporate Center is sponsored by the Blumenfeld Development Group and LaGuardia Corporate Center Associates. Since 1990, the Queens Museum of Art has partnered with the Blumenfeld Development Group to energize the Bulova Corporate Center by presenting arts exhibitions and projects. The works of individual artists or groups of artists are presented in two exhibitions each year.

Supporters

The satellite gallery program at the Bulova Corporate Center is sponsored by the Blumenfeld Development Group and LaGuardia Corporate Center Associates. Since 1990, the Queens Museum of Art has partnered with the Blumenfeld Development Group to energize the Bulova Corporate Center by presenting arts exhibitions and projects. The works of individual artists or groups of artists are presented in two exhibitions each year.