Gyun Hur: yearning

Time Equities Inc. Art-in-Buildings is pleased to announce the newest exhibition in AiB Gallery at Travelers Towers, Gyun Hur: yearning.

Through her delicately composed installation and evocative performances, Gyun Hur creates visual and emotional spaces that allow contemplation of loss and beauty. A continuation of her recent site-specific installations, So we can be near and Enunciation of blessedness, in yearning Hur brings a poetic medley of local river water, glass, and hand-shredded silk flowers to the Art-in-Buildings Gallery space.

Using the gallery’s open windows as a mediator, the artist invites the audience to visually enter her wall and floor installation from the outside; a gesture of reaching out to something ungraspable in the distance. Inside the space, a vinyl rectangle on the floor depicts a dreamy haze of clouds, maps, and figures interacting with Detroit’s many bodies of water – a visual montage that traces the city’s ecological and social histories. A gathering of 36 hand-blown glass vessels in the shape of teardrops contain the very water the graphic references. Over the course of the year-long exhibition, the water in the vessels will evaporate and be refilled, echoing the inevitability of loss while also holding meaning for the regeneration of life

Hur’s fascination with water and silk flowers traces back to her childhood, when she first encountered discarded silk petals at cemeteries after the wind or rain blew them away from their intended grave sites. In her childhood memories from South Korea, rivers were sites of mourning, washing, and rejoicing. Through the pairing of naturally occurring water and synthetic flowers; Hur mulls the fluid nature of mortality, time, and rebirth.

In Hur’s delicately layered and thoughtful installation, she honors Detroit’s rich landscape as the cusp of national borders and bodies of water, loosely inspired by the legacy of Grace Lee Boggs who spoke of justice and yearned for the healing of the local communities she cared for. yearning commemorates both the memories of Detroit’s immense history, while holding hope for a more equitable and ecologically sound future.

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Gyun Hur is an interdisciplinary artist and an educator whose experience as an immigrant daughter deeply fuels her practice. Gyun recently completed the Stove Works Residency, Bronx Museum AIM Fellowship, and Danspace Project Writer-in-Residency. She is the inaugural recipient of The Hudgens Prize. Her works have been featured in Hyperallergic, The Cut, Art In America, Art Paper, Sculpture, Art Asia Pacific, Public Art Magazine Korea, and more. Gyun has contributed as an artist-writer in fLoromancy, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Forgetory. Born in South Korea, she moved to Georgia at the age of 13. She currently lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Parsons School of Design.

For press inquiries contact: QUINN | TEI@quinn.pr | 212.868.1900

Image: Gyun Hur, yearning, 2021. Courtesy the artist.

Photos by Danny Gurung.

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yearning is curated by Tessa Ferreyros with Dana Notine and is sponsored by Time Equities Inc. (TEI) Art-in-Buildings Program. TEI is committed to enriching the experience of our properties through the Art-in-Buildings Program, an innovative approach that brings contemporary art by emerging and mid-career artists to non-traditional exhibition spaces in the interest of promoting artists, expanding the audience for art, and creating a more interesting environment for our building occupants, residents, and their guests.