On the occasion of the launch of K8 Hardy’s Positions, a new publication bringing together the complete Position Series (2007–2012) alongside previously unseen photographs, Now Instant and Picture Palace Pictures present a special screening of Hardy’s cinematic debut Outfitumentary (2016). Hardy will be joined by Rhea Anastas for a discussion after the screening.

A free public reception will follow the screening and conversation at 8PM, with signed copies of Positions available for purchase in the bookstore.

Please note: admission to the reception is free, and does not require a screening ticket to attend.

This program is presented with special thanks to Madeleine Molyneaux and MACK Books.

Outfitumentary appears courtesy the artist; Hardy Studio; Picture Palace Pictures

"In 2001, I set out on the structuralist journey that became my first feature film, Outfitumentary. I named the project at the outset, and considered it a document for posterity, an important record of the dress codes of a radical lesbian underground feminist. The formal rules I imposed were simple: to roll my video camera and capture a shot of myself from head to toe with a turn to provide front and back. Ultimately, I played fast and loose with my own rules, but stayed true to my original intentions.

The film serves to express a fundamental principle that runs through my work and practice—the ways in which the body becomes its own medium. First and foremost, the film is a formal and structural exercise. It is less about narcissism—the narcissism that one might assume given that I am on camera for every frame of the film—than it is about identity, and the way in which both the materiality of the body and its subsequent “outfitting” - in private and public life - serves to refine, define and probe the very nature of the body politic.

As I was consistently shooting this project, my artistic practice tangentially grew to include live performance, often linked to a video signal. Perhaps it was coincidence, perhaps not—I stopped shooting Outfitumentary in early 2012, when my camera finally broke. It was at the same period that I was included in the Whitney Biennial.

In the last few years, I returned to the footage I shot, and began crafting the project into a feature length film. I describe Outfitumentary as a gesamtkunstwerk.

Video as a democratic medium...

My formative years as an artist were spent making video art and experimental Super-8 films. I was interested in the art of cinema, and also in my own performance. I was interested in video as a democratic medium and in its ability to circulate so easily on tapes. I dove into shooting and hand-processing super-8, splicing my films by hand, and also working with 16mm.

I discovered video art through punk rock and riot Grrrl, and through artists and bands that were making videos in that scene. Video was the easiest way for me to make my own statement, to represent myself as a young angry woman, and to get the work out there. I had previously been making small zines and mailing them all over the states. I had a drive to tell my own story. This was a step beyond.

Video was also a way for me to express my queer identity and articulate my thoughts of gender as performance. I was connecting the sexual politics with the experiential. And I was connecting an experimental process with queer politics."

- K8 Hardy, New York, December 2015

Multimedia artist K8 Hardy uses photography in her Position Series (2007–12) to explore identity as performance and construction. Hardy used herself, her sister, and mannequins, styled in eclectic clothes, wigs, and makeup, to suggest personas outside normative categorisations of identity and gender expression, in tension with the ordinary domestic or urban spaces in which they are pictured. In the darkroom, Hardy superimposed bows, glasses, bras, and the spectral outlines of bodies over these portraits: analogue interventions that expose the photograph as a deliberate construction rather than fixed truth. Positions presents all fifty photographs from the cult series plus additional unseen images, cataloguing Hardy’s pathbreaking body of work in the context of the DIY fashion, art, and thrift scenes in queer subcultures of early 2000s New York. Here self-objectification serves as a powerful riposte to the objectification of the female body in life and in art and to exclusionary art institutions, queering the conventions of the portraiture genre in an iconic act of rebellion. 

With a new text by Brontez Purnell 

K8 Hardy is a Texas born, New York based artist committed to engaged participation, focused interrogation and multivalent discourse within local community and broader public spheres. Moving freely across performance, video, photography, and sculpture, treating persona, style, and medium as materials in their own right, her practice is rooted in the DIY ethos of riot grrrl and queer punk culture, centering on the body and construction of self, privileging gesture, immediacy, and disruption over mastery. At its heart, Hardy’s work critiques conventional art world standards, through a deliberate rejection of traditional forms, imparting a clear signal of agency.

Rhea Anastas is a scholar and independent curator, teaches in the Art Dept. at UC Irvine, and was a co-founder of Orchard, a cooperative gallery on New York’s Lower East Side with a predetermined three-year lifespan (2005–8).

Please note: seating for the screening is limited. Box Office opens thirty minutes prior to the listed showtime. Guests may add their name to the standby list upon arrival. Online ticket sales will be honored up until 15 minutes after the scheduled showtime; at that time, any unclaimed seats will be released for in-store purchase on a first-come, first-served basis. All Sales Final.