Jiieh G Hur
Jiieh G Hur’s multidisciplinary practice is rooted in emotional response to personal experiences, exploring perception and sensation and realizing its physical result through sculpture, sound, installation, and drawing. Although her work is exquisitely delicate, Hur’s methods are highly labor-intensive and time-consuming, their fragile nature belying the artist’s meticulous calculations and condensed emotions. Her installation methods in particular take hold of the time that the viewer engages in experience and direct their attention toward it. Invoking the senses, installations such as her exhibition at Whistle, Electric Smash are born from corporal memory and momentary engagement—in this instance, she induced such emotions as anger, rebellion and play in the audience through the actions of holding and throwing. Hur began by filling fist-sized cast plaster balls with blue slime. When thrown at the wall of the exhibition space, they explode with a loud bang and the viscous liquid is sent splattering everywhere, dripping down the wall’s surface.
Holistically, the heart of her work engages the world around her, as demonstrated by an ongoing series of field recordings. These recordings feature tracks composed over months and months of recording, a compilation process that reveals not only Hur’s tenacity, but her understanding of sound as relative to and dependent on time and place for its reception. Like her many drawings and works of collage, they act as an integral link between artist and world, encapsulating time- and site-specific moments that Hur encountered.
Jiieh G Hur (b. 1982) graduated from Otis College of Art and Design with a BFA in Sculpture/New Genres, and received her MFA in Ceramics from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2019, she held Electric Smash, a solo exhibition at Whistle. Her work has been shown at Art Basel Miami and in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Galerie ERD, Opsis Art, Salon de H, ONE AND J. Gallery, and more.