In A Landscape Anew

2011
Hand-shredded Silk Flower Petals, Stone, Mirrors, Turf, Projection
The Hudgens Center of the Arts | Atlanta, Georgia 
Photography by Christina Price Washington

Commissioned by The Hudgens Center of Art with its inaugural Hudgens Prize, In A Landscape Anew is one of the largest scale installations in Hur’s body of work. The artist introduces new hues and materials, a stone and mirrors, alluding to an internal churning in her own personal narrative and reflection on both her artistic and cultural lineages.

Hur expands her usage of hand-shredded silk flowers through shifts in form, color, and illusion. Mirror panels are laid along the display to expand the viewer's perception. Reflections open an elusive and untouchable visual space. Bare wooden frames supporting the mirrors repeat in patterns like a skeletal echo. Stone and turf enliven the floor installation with organic textures, suspended as ‘veritable petrified’* forms of nature and Hur’s biography.

Hur’s childhood photograph in her grandmother’s green garden is projected at the corner of the gallery space as the only literal and revealing reference to the artist’s past.

*

“Silk flowers don’t merely imitate nature but outdo it. As a material, they yield a palette evoking mass production and commerce, and therefore a world impossibly saturated, untouched by the mortality that shadows all living things. Hur deftly asks us to step back from nature and question what our examination of it reveals.”

-Clinque Hicks, Art in America

*Baridon, Michel (1998). Les Jardins- Paysagistes, Jardiniers, Poetes, Éditions Robert Lafont, Paris