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