His Daughter Many Years Ago

2015
Hand shredded silk flowers
As a part of the exhibition “Seurat and Friends,” Artspeak | Vancouver, Canada

Hur occupies almost half of the gallery floor with hand-shredded silk flowers in the group exhibition “Seurat and Friends” at Artspeak. A rare occurrence for the artist’s floor installation to be sharing and negotiating space, Hur intuitively responds to the gallery’s floor plan. The patterns of her companion artists’ paintings are echoed in the tones of this piece. His Daughter Many Years Ago is a purposefully unfinished work as a poetic reference to Hur’s compromised autobiography.

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“The onerous task of hand-shredding silk funerary flowers is an almost invisible labour as the end product is so transformed, becoming an abstract composition on the floor made up of swathes of intense colour that are variously gradated or butting up against one another. The colour and ephemerality of the work are its most striking features and it would be very difficult to identify the material without some background knowledge of the process.”

-Tarah Hogue, Postscript 60:The Specter of Artistic Labour