jodiehardy.com

In fourth grade I used the cardboard from my father’s starched, folded, fresh-from- the- cleaners’ white button-down collar shirts to build a replica of the White House – ever since I’ve been building things. Later that summer my life as a tomboy ended when I was first told I couldn’t join the boys in Little League, then told to “be a lady” – ever since I’ve had a strange push and pull relationship with clothing. These two forces drive my work as an artist – the desire to create three-dimensional objects, and a personal wrangling with the forces that dictate fashion. My preference for building lean-to huts got hijacked by my schooling and the mores of the northern Indiana small town folks that raised me. All carpentry practices went underground, and serious artistic intentions were nixed due to the bad reputation I was told was attached to such free-wheeling, socially rebellious types. Home economics was the only accepted form of female creative output, so making clothes became a testing ground for my attempts at establishing a feminine persona. I was constantly pushing the boundaries of materials – and wantonly defying parental hemline restrictions. A Saturday mother-daughter ritual of shopping at the local department store did little to define me as a young woman due to boring, conservative Midwestern retail offerings; nonetheless, it offered a glimpse into a world of make-believe characters enacting mysterious ever-changing narratives.  Dainty, regal, plaster cast mannequins in nebulous settings sent strange signals . They pointed to who I knew I would never be, and alluded to behind-the-scenes directives that have most recently become the focus of my practice.
Upon entering the academy after years of professional life, I stumbled across the book, The Language of Clothes by Allison Lurie.  It seemed to offer a key to understanding the difficult terrain I had encountered as an adolescent who reluctantly had left behind rough-and-tumble attire to girl-up. It opened a floodgate of questions. Could there be something to this theory that codes exist for clothing? Is character really revealed through clothing, or do people simply jump to conclusions about someone because of the clothes they wear? What if someone wears the “wrong” thing, whether it is intentional or not, and she is misjudged? What are the ethical implications if someone wears clothing in an attempt to pass, or to deceive? And most importantly, who writes these rules of dress? To investigate I experimented with character revealing or concealing clothing on stage, working as both student and freelance costume designer.
A year later, after interrupting my degree for a short gig as costume shop assistant manager at Indiana Repertory theatre, I returned to academia to pursue fine art and art history studies at Herron School of Art and Design. My dual degree interests began to mingle visibly with an assigned reading of Emile Zola’s novel, The Ladies’ Paradise, which inspired a series of investigations into the social constructs of gendered identity – as purported by visual merchandising.   In my piece of the same name, I was thinking about the seductive qualities of display products and how they can have the power to sell articles of clothing that might otherwise look ridiculous, or at the least unappealing, if they were simply plopped on the counter, shelf or window sill. I was noticing that men’s visual merchandising forms stood in sharp contrast to women’s, and realized that femininity and masculinity were being re-enforced by the ways in which clothing was presented by sellers to potential buyers. They seemed to me to speak against the ambiguity I felt as a heterosexual woman who preferred the comfort and freedom of men’s clothing, but who also longed for the promised sensuality and allure of restrictive and uncomfortable feminine offerings. This ambiguity was played out with my installation, I Know I’m Not Perfect, But I’m So Close it Scares Me. At the time I thought I was exploring how articles of clothing themselves are gender-coded, but looking on it from this standpoint, I wonder if I was somehow attempting to cast-off the pressures I was feeling to not dress like a little man, as it was once put to me.  
Soon after came a performance piece that explored the fervor with which I saw an affluent acquaintance shop. On one visit to her lovely new condo, a sea of shopping bags filled the floor of her home theatre room, conversations revolved around her purchases, and I became the recipient of compliments regarding my cobbled-together Goodwill outfits, which produced an uncomfortable mix of pride and shame. In YBNH (Your Business Name Here) I tried to illustrate how agency is pursued through shopping. I would much later learn about theories of retail therapy and the commodity self.    I also attempted to inject humor into my work, and my discomfort at being the center of attention was offset by the audience’s laughing participation.
Although I was purposefully avoiding constructing actual garments at the time in order to avoid associations with costuming, I noticed other artists’ were building garments as their medium. Yinka Shonibare and Caroline Broadhead, whose empty dresses were captivating critics and collectors alike, were of particular interest to me. Shonibare’s 19th Century bourgeoisie gowns of Dutch wax African fabrics demonstrated an outspokenness that I admired regarding the “aspect of protest” in his work, and this gave me permission to more boldly address issues I found pressing. Caroline Broadhead’s pared-down ethereal forms showed me how the garment can serve as a metaphor for “the possible conflicts/tensions between inside and outside” (Broadhead).   I soon launched into a series of work that revealed these influences. Some of my critics called these pieces heavy handed, and after careful consideration, I decided I’d rather take a boisterous stand than dabble in obscurity.
A friend of mine once called me a retail anthropologist because of the manner in which I seek information, materials, and solace. Goodwill serves me best. There I see the things that were designed, manufactured, marketed, sold, used and then eventually discarded for others to then consume. When I discovered a pair of little girls pajamas printed with images of diamond rings and martini glasses, and text stating “Big party,” I began to question what would motivate an adult buyer to purchase such provocative wear for a small child. Deeper questions regarding who makes the decisions to profit from a business venture exploiting girls prompted a series of works called Dressing Our Daughters, among them a baby crib mobile suggesting the earliest possible signals sent to little ones. At the same time the Associated Press ran an article about a University of Bath Marketing and Psychology research project that revealed adolescent girl’s were destroying their Barbie doll’s  as a “right of passage” and an “imaginative means in disposing an excessive commodity in the same way as one might crush cans for recycling” (Lawless). I found this phenomenon both hilarious and disturbing, and decided I liked these slippery areas of ambiguity and wanted to explore this realm of uncertainty further.
My goal was to attempt eliciting ambiguity itself, or at least do some juxtapositioning to approximate it. I hoped to make the viewer giggle, then perhaps feel a little disturbed at the same time, a feat Tom Otterness accomplishes in monumental style. Otterness could be credited with being the strongest influence that inspired me to shift my practice into the public realm. His exhibit Tom Otterness in Indianapolis, which included 17 bulbous bronzes placed throughout the city center in the spring and early summer of 2005, was a revelation. A summer job had me walking to Circle Center Mall amongst the tourists and convention goers. I was fascinated by Otterness’ ability to capture the attention of pedestrians with seemingly innocuous humor to deliver his biting social commentary. Pedestrian’s chuckles turned to astute observations in the time it took to wait for the walk signal at intersections. This, I thought, was how I wanted my art to circulate; on sidewalks and other pedestrian byways. I made it my objective to pursue public art and recently became a member of the inaugural class of Herron’s new Masters of Fine Art in Visual Art and Public Life to hone my practice.
In March I approached the Arts Council of Indianapolis with an inquiry regarding the Urban Interpretations; Picture Windows Program.  At the time I was working on a piece for the recycle/repurpose runway show ReCouture, which was held May 2nd at the Harrison Center for the Arts. Inspired by the snarky comments made during the presidential primaries by media wonks regarding Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits, I asked myself, “what does a woman seeking a position of authority wear?” Prone to working in series, my proposal to the Arts Council was the next logical step in the manipulation of caution tape, and the examination of what a woman of consequence should wear.  My research quickly turned up a phenomenon in fashion magazines that I could no longer ignore, and soon the more pressing inquiry became, “what’s up with that?”
.  The more I looked at a wide variety of fashion magazines, the more I found variations on this same contorted posture of caved-in torso, bent knees, hunched and rounded shoulders. This launched a more pointed research question asking, why is this unnatural, contrived pose used repeatedly to sell high-end clothing in fashion magazines?
At the time of organizing a formal proposal to the Arts Council, I had come to notice the vast differences in the ways in which the epitome of fashion, the evening gown, is presented in the fashion magazine versus on mannequins in retail window displays. Most mannequins show their wares at attention, as opposed to that of the crumpled model. The Silent Sellers was conceived to illustrate these differences, but it was in the process of expanding the original proposal for two windows into three at the invitation of the Arts Council that the breadth of my questions also expanded. I began to wonder about the broader reach of marketing high fashion. This ongoing question-asking usually serves me well, and things began to congeal; my interest in the commodity self and the systems that promote it, my interest in the mannequin as a selling tool and its “existence between the living and the dead,” and the marketing of these concepts to little girls came together in the form of The Silent Sellers, my satire on the manufacturing of desire. (Sandberg).
The fulcrum for the triptych is the center window, which is concerned with fashion photography. As mentioned earlier, it all started with the pose. Where did it originate? The best I can determine is it developed with Irving Penn and his supermodel wife Lisa Fonssagrives in the early 1950’s. As stated in the catalogue for Penn’s retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, the models of the 50’s were known to “draw themselves up into irreproachable postures, thereby showing us they have what it takes to wear the clothes. Their social superiority begins with this physical one” (Westerbeck). Fonssagrives may have invented this trophyesque pose, but in the 58 years since it has been exaggerated into a grotesque facsimile. The trophy has been stripped of its verve, as if the dress itself is the supporting structure for the woman within. The extravagant, expensive evening gown builds a seductive appeal through this phenomenon of seeming to have a life of its own, an existence that is more robust than that of the its wearer. John Berger claimed, “the state of being envied is what constitutes glamour,” but I remain unconvinced that a limp and listless countenance is something worthy of aspiration.
In the window to the south of this is my take on visual merchandising. Window display as an artform is usually only practiced at the most illustrious of retail establishments in cities such as New York, London, Tokyo and Paris. The mysterious or elaborate windows that I viewed as a youngster disappeared long ago from most Main Street windows in America, leaving behind highly the stylized and sparse glass theatres of remaining conglomerate retailers that operate on the levels below the high end giants. Expensive mannequins have given way to practical versions that are without facial features. Most are headless altogether. Is the message; don’t think! Just buy!?   
Themes or narratives are often used as a cohesive element in window display, and many artists including Duchamp, Dali, and Warhol used the store window as an installation venue to expand their repertoire. The mannequin itself became a medium for the surrealists to explore Walter Benjamin’s assertion that the mannequin was “seller and commodity in one.” Current trade publications and websites tout the value of these silent sales people, as they are known in the industry. They are sculpted to an ideal, for consumption by the retailers, hawking mass-produced, and for a lucky few, designer label goods, all for the visual pleasure and critical eye of the shopper’s astute gaze. My mannequin is a strange creature. She would stand over six feet tall if she had a head. Her pelvic bones are proportionally impossible.  She is able to simultaneously throw her shoulders back to display a sculpted spine while they are rounded forward to show off her collarbones. Her 34 – 24 – 34 measurements are a cliché. She is a size four, or size two if measured by vanity sizing, and her feet are size 10 extra wide. She’s quite a doll! She is more akin to a Big-foot Barbie than a human.
The Barbie window seemed to be a logical completion of the trilogy. I sought to create the illusion of a mass merchandising display at a big box retailer. Plenty for all! When I began searching for Barbies at the thrift stores I was stunned by the high percentage of blondes. Out of 114 dolls, only two are real African American Barbies, one’s a knock-off, making it three. The other “ethnicities” are Disney characters with Barbie bodies; one Asian, Mulan, and a handful of Pocahontas’.  I found fewer Barbies for sale in the Metro Goodwills, maybe one or two per trip, but more than I could fathom at stores in outlying areas such as Rochester and Columbus, Indiana netting 15 to 20 at a time. Perhaps the city girls had popped theirs in the microwave when puberty arrived leaving none to give to the poor.
When asked about the rhinestones in their eyes, I have had to honestly respond that it was both an intuitive and pragmatic decision. I wanted to further the consistency of the beauty applications, and I wanted to find an element that would both attract and repel. I knew I hit the mark when the WFYI videographer said he thought the eyes were creepy, but creepy in a good kind of way.
Since window display in most urban centers has become formulaic, most passersby barely notice. When something out of the ordinary – ordinary consisting of mannequins or dressmaker’s dummies fitted with color coordinated seasonal clothing – when something is at odds with the ordinary or gives it a new twist, notice takes place involuntarily. I watched this happen time and again when I was installing the displays. People, who had been focused on the tops of their shoes, or their phone conversation, were nudged from their insular experience to look through the glass.  I was told recently that these windows could pass as “the real thing”, like those in New York. It is this liminal space of uncertainty that I aim for.
What I find compelling about working within the space of storefront windows is the ability to manipulate the codes that have become a part of pedestrian visual culture for over a hundred years. These are deeply imbedded in the urban psyche, and even small towns have vestiges in their early 20th century brick storefront windows. With current retailing development trending toward new urbanism, the nostalgia of Main Street is now being built into upper scale shopping centers. Window displays are returning, but will the art of window display come with it? Will a new visual culture of window display evolve? Who will design the message? Will company employees toe the line? Will freelance artists be given creative freedom? Will sanctioning and censorship take place as it did in 2007 when Victoria’s Secret window displays became the target of moralizing mothers concerned about obscenity? In spite of the adage that “Sex Sells,” I think it has become a default tactic that exacerbates provincial taboos, exhibiting a lack of imaginative effort on the part of those reverting to it, and wonder further who’s in charge of planning the strategy behind it.  
I long ago left behind serving simple answers, instead I let my curiosity lead me to distilled observations that are translated into work that I hope operates on multiple levels of engagement. I strive to participate in the public discourse regarding the manufacturing of desire by wriggling vigorously in the murky brew of ambiguity, pointing a lens at the things of everyday life.