K8 Hardy
(New York, NY)
Outfitumentary
Co-presented with the lumber room on the occasion of their exhibition The Rose, curated by Justine Kurland, which closes October 28, 2023.
Outfitumentary appears courtesy the artist; Hardy Studio; Picture Palace Pictures
Outfitumentary trailer courtesy Hardy Studio and Picture Palace Pictures
PROGRAM DETAILS
Film Screening: November 9, 2023, at 7:00 pm
Masks recommended.
DESCRIPTION
In 2001, artist and filmmaker K8 Hardy set out to document her daily outfits on video. Over an eleven-year period, until the camera broke, she captured these outfits - and outfitting- on a fairly consistent, if not daily basis. She used the same shitty, mini-DV camera and filmed in ever-changing living spaces and art studios in New York. What emerged is a record of the way a young, lesbian feminist dressed and styled in her “coming of age” and an examination of coded fashion statements.
Directed, Produced, Photographed, and Edited by K8 Hardy
Co-Producer: Madeleine Molyneaux
Production Company: Hardy Studio
Sound Design: Lynne Trepanier
Online Editor/Colorist: Drew Bolton
Sales: Picture Palace Pictures
Artist K8 Hardy on Outfitumentary
“In 2001, I set out on the structuralist journey that has become 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. 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.
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.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
K8 Hardy (b. 1977, Fort Worth, Texas) is an artist and filmmaker based# in New York. Her performances, photographs, self-distributed zines, videos (including music videos for Le Tigre, Lesbians on Ecstasy and Men) and films have been exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art/Whitney Biennial 2012; MoMA PS1, NY; Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texas; The Tate Modern, London; Reena Spaulings Fine Art, NYC; Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst und Medien in Graz, Austria.
K8 Hardy studied at Smith College, the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College, and the Whitney Independent Study Program. Outfitumentary is her first feature film.