The series Void shows my fascination for the everyday life and hidden moments. After my graduation I lived in New York City for a while, a city that counts sixty thousand elevators. Together, these elevators make eleven billion trips a year, thirty million trips a day and at this moment. over twenty thousand invisible moments are about to be lost in time and space.
Vivarium is the collective name for terrariums, aquariums and other recreated ecosystems in which animals are kept for observation. In Hardy's Vivarium it is precisely people who, lost in thought, are publicly exposed. Each tableau, or Episode, has its own theme and is like a cryptogram that shows its true nature when you decipher the code. For example, Episode 3 confronts us with the glorification of the Dutch colonial past by means of a ticket office for the VOC Swing-ship De Achilles. In Episode 4 we discover that Andrea, the owner of an Italian cinema, is struggling with his culturally defined role as a man, as we see how he dreams of freeing himself from this defined gender identity in Episode 5. The scenes feel lifelike thanks to Hardy's hyper-realistic working method: he designs, builds and photographs sets where he fuses even the smallest details into a poetic narrative. Next he makes photomontages which are then shown life-size - one-on-one - in a light box with a window frame. The construction of each of these contemporary "trompe-l'oeils" takes 3 to 4 months.
Dirk Hardy
Dirk Hardy (1989, NL) is interested in the relationship people enter into with their environment and with each other. With Vivarium, an ongoing project that took-off in 2018, Hardy constructs hyperrealistic "purposeful fiction": contemporary worlds that express the complexity of our zeitgeist.
With his tableaus Hardy welcomes the viewer to a multitude of worlds. In his creative process he draws from a web of observations, memories and imagination, and responds to both large and small events in the world. He explores the complexity of life in an idiosyncratic and compassionate way and in doing so, aims to increase our social sensitivity.
Hardy studied Architecture at Eindhoven University of Technology and afterwards Photography at the Willem de Kooning Academy. He is nominated for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2021 (UK), and launches Vivarium in the accompanying exhibition. His first solo is planned for the end of 2021 in museum MOYA (NL). In 2019 he showed his work for the first time on an international stage during Photo Basel.
