'Tim Hardy: Decor’, exhibition installation view, Treadler, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland. Courtesy of Treadler.

Tim Hardy, Act One: Domestic Scene, 2024, archival prints on baryta paper, custom blackwood frame, 370 × 1120 mm. Courtesy of Treadler.

Tim Hardy, Act Three: The Lament, 2024, detail, archival print on baryta paper, custom blackwood frame, 370 × 1120 mm. Courtesy of Treadler.

Tim Hardy, Act Two: Compact Mirror, 2024, detail, archival print on baryta paper, custom blackwood frame, 370 × 1120 mm. Courtesy of Treadler.

Tim Hardy’s ‘Decor’ is sneaky, like the best conceptual art. Cunning like the conceit of things hidden in drawers, actually. Although coldly oblique at first, the contents of each of Hardy’s photographic panels is eventually revealed, similarly to how Marguerite Duras rummages through her own chest of drawers in Practicalities (1987), a collection of autobiographical essays, excerpts of which are distributed at the show as a bundle of dishevelled paper scraps—again, just like you might find tucked away in the ramshackle neglect of an ‘everything drawer’. Which is to say, like Duras in her essays, Hardy is interested in the baroque, the romantic and the mysterious, and in marrying these things to the everyday, to the domestic. What’s in a chest of drawers? Depending on the drawers you might have old secrets gathering dust (or shame), unpaid bills, love letters, or any amount of useless bric-à-brac which at one time might’ve seemed important. But things fade. Or conversely, they wax in importance, even in their neglect, to be resurrected at a later date. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes by chance.

The photographs within Hardy’s panels (read: drawers) are imagistic mementos, floating out of context much like the notes we embalm as memory, the very bedrock of recall. Nothing is recalled whole; our sense of history (personal, national) is a haphazard bundle of fragments, the more sensory the better. Here we have: images of someone’s intimate effects, Act One: Domestic Scene (2024); feminine legs surrounded by luggage, Act Two: Compact Mirror (2024); and a violin, Act Three: The Lament (2024). Drowning in negative space and utterly void of explication, Hardy’s invitation here is to confabulate, to dream connective tissue where there is none. Such is the mystery of old drawers, or an old bureau. The kind your grandparents have, which probably isn’t haunted but emanates the vibration of the past; a banal kind of hauntology, the eerie thickness of layered residues. The confounding silence of the trace. If these images are inaccessible, it is the inaccessibility of someone else’s life which we can only read in glimpses. Every history that isn’t ours is an alien ruin.

Between the disarray of a ransacked drawer set and the alluring legs of a woman in transit (presumably), the idea of a traveller is evoked in Hardy’s work. Perhaps these are ghostly or sad images because they’re all that’s left of a person that’s gone. Not dead necessarily, which makes the situation arguably even more crushing than a bereavement, because they have vanished due to circumstances or (worse) choice. Perhaps then the violin emits a dirge of unspeakable loss. That we are here, while the traveller is out there collecting more experiences, more memories, more artefacts for her own drawers, which she can then curate in the museum of old age. To speculate further, perhaps the sense of grief found in ‘Decor’ is laced with the bitter realisation that no person can ever be contained within a drawer, that a living breathing person is always more than the ritual objects we use to conjure them. Flesh violently trumps symbolism.

‘Decor’ is a promising albeit quiet vision from a young visual artist perhaps poised to do something bolder down the line. Though in caveat the stillness of the works is probably the point; that memory is dead, that its artefacts are dead, that hoarding the past in dusty totems can never be the séance we perhaps want it to be. And it can certainly never be resurrected in the ways we’d like. Still, the romance here is (so much like Duras) one of longing, born of quiet. Quiet between momentous action where we wobble, or doubt, or look back out of fear of what’s ahead; defensively craving the past as something completely and utterly known which in itself is a delusion. If there’s one thing that can’t be trusted, it’s our memories of the past. They’re curated like anything else, selected or denied according to criteria in the present, subject to so much occult revision. Which, by this essential tragedy, is probably why we hunt and collect so many tchotchkes related to versions of ourselves we can never receive again except as ghostly hallucinations, by the turn of the planchette. Kept, of course, in an old chest of drawers.

Samuel Te Kani (Ngapuhi), Tamaki Makaurau/Auckland

‘Decor’ is on display at Treadler until 15 August 2024.

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