“In a Landscape Anew,” Gyun Hur's striking solo show at Hudgens Center for the Arts, demonstrates the difference that time and monetary support can make in the development of a talented young artist.
Hur, who is known for installations made of meticulously ordered stripes of shredded artificial flowers, won the Hudgens Award a year ago. The award came with $50,000 and the promise of this exhibition.
Hur used some of the money to finance a trip to her native Korea. A longing for, and cherished memories of, this faraway home had always fueled her art, manifested in both its elegiac tone and the repeated image of her mother's striped wedding blanket.
Hur's extended visit somehow freed her from the need to mourn this past. In so doing, it propelled her forward. This two-part installation in the main galleries reveals a new direction both in form and content.
Shredded flowers remain her basic material and her pigment, but she has replaced the stripes and their bold contrasting colors with fields of color that feature subtle gradations of hue, and she has added three-dimensional objects to the mix.
This new work explores the notion of landscape, both as a spatial experience and an artistic construct. The first section is oriented to the window facing the gallery's sculpture garden. Hur has broken out of the rectangle to create an angular shape composed of a peppery orange and an ebony black, which meet in an irregular border. The black color continues up the wall underneath the window so that window becomes a part of the piece. A mirror on a free-standing perpendicular wall adds spatial complexity.
Hur has further animated the composition by the careful placement of a small boulder on the black field and a cone of lime green shredded flowers in front of it.
The installation brings to mind a Japanese rock garden, which, like her own work, is a highly abstracted, artificial landscape. But there are shades of artificial: the garden seen through the window might seem like "real” nature, but it, too, is a constructed landscape, though its materials are live plants.
The green cone, a rather quirky fillip, telegraphs vulnerability, long a theme in her work, but also a new freedom from the order and rationality of past compositions.
That same green color blankets the floor of the second gallery, bounded on two sides by an L-shaped structure with mirrored sides and artificial turf on the top – as if a minimalist Donald Judd sculpture has gone to seed. The subtle gradation of color creates a shimmering op-art effect.
Two barely discernible images – an old photo from her grandmother's garden in Korea and American greenery– are projected on a short wall behind it. Perhaps they refer to mental landscapes.
Hur hasn't abandoned stripes, as the small drawings and sculptures here suggest, but she is clearly interested in shedding their strictures in terms of composition and the labor-intensive exactitude required of their installation. Process and labor remain a key element, but now she can be nimbler in executing ideas and less dependent on others to help her.
The first part of the installation is more effective visually and spatially than the second. The projection is so vague as to be hermetic, and its placement in a corner doesn't quite work. The jarring black curtain behind the piece is an unfortunate solution to darkening the adjacent screening area for Hur's videos (a short on “Spring Hiatus,” a temporary piece she made this year in Lenox Square commissioned by Flux Projects, and one of recent performance).
But both parts are impressively well-considered and executed, especially as the debut of a brand-new direction. I would say that Hur's benefactors have gotten a very good return on their investment. And so have we.
REVIEW
“In a Landscape Anew: Gyun Hur.”
Through Feb. 17, 2012. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesdays-Fridays. The Hudgens Center for the Arts, 6400 Sugarloaf Pkwy # 300, Duluth. (770) 623-6002. thehudgens.org
The bottom line: Gyun Hur fulfills the promise of the Hudgens Award in this engaging solo show.
Catherine Fox is chief art critic for ArtsCriticATL.com.
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