I recently went up to
Regina Rex gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn to check out a two-person show by John Almanza and Dave Hardy. Upon entering, the starkness of the gallery's brightness near blinded me and I had the sensation that I was walking into one of those heaven-dream movie sequences. Even the floor was white! The atmosphere at Regina Rex is always altered to fit the work and this exhibition was no exception. After my eyes adjust I am confronted by sculptures that seem to float in midair.
Dave Hardy's new sculptures are wonderfully paradoxical. They are compelling in their stoic fragility. Made from architectural detritus such as random sheets of glass, wood beams, carpet foam and wall board, they are strategically assembled, balanced arrangements. The text that accompanies the show describes them as "borrowing from the assertive gestures of modernist sculpture" and though I would use the word masculine, I did not find them heroic. Human scale, they inhabit the space like bodies - but as the text also suggests - they exist in tension. The glass panes that give views to other parts of the work create a kind of abstract temporality that I found both melancholy and triumphant.
