NYAB Event - Dave Hardy “The Hairy Hand”

Dave Hardy “The Hairy Hand”

Churner and Churner

This event has ended.

Churner and Churner presents a solo exhibition of new sculptures by Dave Hardy. Hardy’s studies in balance and composition are composed of salvaged materials: thick sheets of glass, foam, metal, pencils, and the occasional pretzel. Layered, towered, and twinned, the objects hover at the edge of stability; yet the sculptures’ seemingly precarious poise is an intentionally engineered defiance of gravity.

Of the several sculptures that Hardy created for his first exhibition at Churner and Churner, two are specifically scaled to dominate the gallery space. In one large piece, a diving board (with its “caution” stickers still attached) confronts a similarly sized pane of glass: standing upright on two foam sheets with another long sheet draped between them, the planks become improbable totems, strange bedfellows that lie somewhere between Brancusi’s Kiss and Serra’s Prop Piece. In a second sculpture, Hardy piles foam padding atop thin legs of glass that rest against the back wall. Such a construction feels delicate and contingent, as if its striations of muted colors were slowing slumping toward the ground. Distinguished by a constant shuttle between literal and allegorical readings, Hardy’s artworks are both resolutely materialist and infused with a human scale and, more precisely, a human fragility that forces the viewer to confront them as bodies in space. They are, as Hardy has written, “abandoned monuments pushing up against each other … like bodies in an abject struggle with gravity and time.”