It's hard to imagine a space for a public art installation more unexpected -- and, well, more public -- than the one where Gyun Hur has for two weeks created an enormous striped "blanket" from shredded silk flowers.
But part of the mission of the 2-year-old Atlanta nonprofit Flux Projects, which commissioned the Marietta artist's "Spring Hiatus," is to engage an unsuspecting public with art amid their daily to and fro, outside the usual museum or gallery setting. If you want to capture a cross section of humanity in metro Atlanta, where shopping for some is a sport and a form of culture, it's hard to beat Lenox Square.
Flux had mounted a huge modern dance happening in 2009 and a 2010 video installation there when it started discussing the site with Hur. Having created four similar shredded-flower installations in relatively monastic halls of culture, she wasn't sure about building her biggest piece yet in a humming hall of commerce.
Yet earlier this week, after 11 days of working outside the main entrance to Macy's -- amid blaring boutique music, the wafting aroma of baking cookies and the hustle of kiosk capitalists -- Hur was starting to get into the mall groove. For the most part, she had enjoyed the shifting sea of citizenry that had paused outside the short rectangular wall that secures her work to ask what she was up to. Impressed, many snapped cell phone photos.
"Atlanta is not a walking city like Chicago and New York, so people don't naturally encounter art unless you know where to go," said Hur, 28, who won the inaugural $50,000 Hudgens Prize last year from Duluth's Hudgens Center for the Arts on the strength of a smaller installation. "And there's a misconception about what art is, that you have to know what you're looking at.
"By just putting it in a space like Lenox, people are just drawn, and they stop and think about what's going on in front of their eyes," she continued. "It's really great."
So what is going on with the 64 impossibly straight rainbow rows on the mall's stone floor that Hur installed with the help of her parents and friends?
The 16-by-30-foot piece, with its eight sets of eight colors in repeating patterns, can be easily appreciated for its pleasing appearance alone, like a Tibetan sand mandala. But there's more to it than aesthetics: The stripes replicate the Korean wedding blanket of the artist's mother, Soon Hur, and speak to the feelings of loss and dislocation their daughter suffered when the family immigrated to the United States from South Korea when she was 13.
Hur says the blanket installations also evoke her grandmother's garden in the village of Singdong where Gyun played as a 3-year-old. The family had to sell the land because of financial difficulty, and its beautiful flora withered.
"Nobody explained it to me," Hur recalled. "As a young girl it was very traumatic. And I think that sense of loss translated to my identity when I moved here to the States, losing my language and starting to feel like I was not belonging anywhere."
But the artist has metamorphosed those sad memories through the healing power of making art. Slicing some 12,000 silk flowers and then recycling them in a colorful context that pays tribute to familial connections -- with her parents assisting her every step of the way -- gives Hur the chance to re-create "a visual landscape" of her happiest childhood memories.
At a mall that draws more than 100,000 visitors on a busy Saturday, strangers who gaze at "Spring Hiatus" will find much more than they bargained for.
Art preview
"Spring Hiatus"
On view through March 25 at Lenox Square during mall hours. Hur will discuss her work 2-5 p.m. March 12. Free. View a video at www.fluxprojects.org/springhiatus.
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