Skip to main content

The big picture: the party’s over, but whose party?

Anne Hardy’s 2005 staged photograph of an abandoned room suggests an intriguing variety of histories

Anne Hardy’s photograph invites us to make up stories. What has kicked off here? An end-of-term physics department knees-up? An unfinished experiment into big bang theory employing party poppers and plywood? A chain-smokers’ convention? The circuit diagrams on the blackboard appear to offer some clues, but on closer inspection they seem to be mind maps for systems we can’t quite fathom. And what of the demon bunny on the shelf?

For years, Hardy has created such fictional rooms in her studio in Hackney, east London, mostly out of rubbish she has found on walking tours of the streets nearby. Sometimes, she makes casts of the things she finds and uses the cast in her pictures. She has habitually spent months putting a room together and then, when it has felt complete, she has photographed it and moved on to the next set of found objects. In recent years, she has created some rooms as installations and allowed visitors in, leaving their shoes at the door. She says of her work that she hopes it is like “pulling up the lino in your kitchen and finding another five layers beneath”. She was supposed to be a scientist, she adds, but became an artist by accident.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2DIg4U7

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV

When Brooklyn was queer: telling the story of the borough's LGBTQ past

In a new book, Hugh Ryan explores the untold history of queer life in Brooklyn from the 1850s forward, revealing some unlikely truths For five years Hugh Ryan has been hunting queer ghosts through the streets of Brooklyn, amid the racks of New York’s public libraries, among its court records and yellow newspaper clippings to build a picture of their lost world. The result is When Brooklyn Was Queer, a funny, tender and disturbing history of LGBTQ life that starts in an era, the 1850s, when those letters meant nothing and ends before the Stonewall riots started the modern era of gay politics. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2H9Zexs