Speakeasy with ... Gyun Hur

For a show named repose, Gyun Hur’s solo installation at Get This! Gallery certainly does send a zing! through the space. Inspired by her mother’s wedding blanket, and constructed from tediously chopped silk cemetery flowers, Hur simultaneously explores celebration, mourning and rebirth. Hur will give an artist talk at the gallery tomorrow, Sat., Feb. 20, from 1-2 p.m. during the Westside Arts District third Saturday art walk. In person, Hur is as bright and engaging as her work, so make sure to stop by for a listen.

Would you talk about conceptualizing the idea of the exhibit and discuss the process of creating it?

I was dealing a lot with the idea of loss and how to approach that idea of loss and also the memory of the past. All of those things were always kind of a part of my work. So one of the items that I found in my house was my mother’s wedding blanket. I just put it in my car and brought it to my studio and it was there for a few months and I just kept looking at it. It looked just like this points to the floor at the exhibit’s central piece and there’s white borders. And I kept looking at it and looking at it and one day just put it on a raw floor and it looked so beautiful. It just resonated with me so much about that comfort and loss and the things that are known and the privacy — it combined so much of what I was trying to talk about. That image was so vivid and powerful at the time, and I just wanted to do something about it. In the meantime time I was collecting discarded cemetery flowers with the permission from the cemetery. When they get blown away by the wind they just have to clean them up. So I decided to collect these flowers and the colors matched and I was like, “Oh my goodness!”

At the time I was studying materials and also my interest in obsessive behaviors and those kind of behaviors that come from some kind of trauma. All these things kind of started coming together so I started literally deconstructing and obsessively just kind of shredding these flowers by colors and then replicating this wedding blanket. I just thought it would tell everything that I wanted to tell.

Where does your interest in the psychology of obsessive behaviors come from?

That was my whole thesis. I think younger artists, we try to kind of find out where we come from and what it is that makes us try to be an artist. For me, I think personally just a lot of my personal narratives kind of became a huge part of my work so kind of my childhood traumas and memories and losses that I could not resolve for myself really manifest in the art. One of the things that i think is really exciting about this show is I really felt like after the thesis the work has taken on its own life. It decided to become bigger than what I wanted to say.