Photo by Carla Aaron-Lopez.

Chop, chop. Chop, chop, chop.

“I literally just see them as pigments and as my palette to create an image or a visual phenomenon on the floor or in the space,” said Gyun Hur.

Chop, chop.

Boxes of silk flowers cover a table surrounded by two women and two men. They chop the flowers using paper cutters over and over again separating the various pigments into small cups. They are preparing for Gyun Hur’s newest floor installation inside one of Atlanta’s busiest centers of commerce, Lenox Square Mall, in a video produced by Proper Medium on the Flux Projects website.

UPDATE: The installation, Spring Hiatus, will begin to disappear this weekend, but it will remain on view until it is completely dismantled Tuesday, March 29, 2011.

Lenox Square is located in the Buckhead community of Atlanta and is operated through Simon Property Group, Inc., which employs over 5,000 people worldwide. The Buckhead area houses one of Atlanta’s largest affluent communities, banking a median household income of over $114,000 annually. The shopping center currently lists nearly 5,700 fans on Facebook, and, according to Anne Dennington, executive director of Flux Projects, it draws over 105,000 visitors on an average Saturday. “These are pulled from all walks of life, from in-town neighborhoods, the suburbs, and tourists,” she explained in a press release.

Hur, with the help of Flux Projects, composed colorful shredded silk flowers laid in tight straight lines at 16 by 30 feet located in the first level breezeway. The green, red, yellow, white, cream, purple, pink, and blue chopped bits are organized carefully into rows on the floor — no adhesive of any kind binds the flowers together.

There’s a quiet meditation behind her installations. Everything must be placed carefully on the floor to avoid being disturbed. Her repetitive lines of color resemble patterned quilts made by a grandmother’s hand. The precise attention paid to detail is what makes Spring Hiatus absolutely phenomenal. The piece reaches beyond its initial meaning of destruction and creation through its location in a place where commerce reigns supreme. The mall’s bland-ass, neutral gray-and-white interior is offset by this island-burst of colors in front of the Macy’s entrance on the first level.

Photo by Carla Aaron-Lopez.

I visited the site at a time when the sun was high in the sky and shining brightly throughout the building’s glass ceiling. Louis Corrigan, founder of Flux Projects, was on duty to talk about the work on that day. One of Corrigan’s intentions for Flux, he explained, is to bring more of the Atlanta art community into public spaces to interact with my fellow ATLiens.

It was cool to see random shoppers and visitors stopping to ask questions about the work. Some simply stood in front of the installation taking it in silently, interrupting the shopping travels. With Atlanta being an international and diverse city with a high population of African Americans, Latinos, and Asians, hopefully, the art community is beginning to reflect the city’s diversity instead of its whitewashed and boring affluent past.

“It’s in the most public space that it can ever be in,” said Hur in Proper Medium’s video documentary. “We expect a lot of people to be browsing. It’s not necessarily an audience that encounters art, and it looks like a carpet from afar [laughter].”

When you move up close and crouch down low, the lines appear to travel forever until you stand up again. From the second level, it has another impact: It looks like something you want to pick up and touch or a large piece of tapestry repurposed and updated. Viewing Spring Hiatus from upstairs reinforced the idea that this work relates to identity, memory, and family connections.

Photo courtesy Flux Projects.

Photo courtesy Flux Projects.

“Without the integration of my family and the labor, I think the work wouldn’t have had this sort of raw power or meaning,” said Hur. “I didn’t mind so much of the process, because a lot of my work was talking about labor and violence and ritualistic behavior that yields something else. So by destroying something, I am yielding something else that is beautiful, and I am reconstructing a visual landscape that talks about memories.”

Hur’s work is connected to memories of her family living in Korea before they came to the United States. Using an object such as a silk flower reflects a simple yet modern human connection like a garden in a home. The expansive lines arranged meticulously on the ground connect to a family memory of her grandmother giving her mother a rainbow-colored quilt before her wedding. While viewing this work, I experienced the same emotion I felt when my grandmother gave me a family quilt.

Memories we share amongst our family give us the identity we develop as we grow into adulthood, along with the places we’ve been and friends we’ve made. Most times, we can get so busy that we forget about the time spent with the loved ones we grew up with. Just like an heirloom tapestry, Spring Hiatus represents the importance that the artist gives to her family history and identity, and it forces us to reflect about ours, but not aggressively. It does this passively through the size of the installation and vibrant pattern of color, turning the shoppers into viewers.

Luckily, Hur’s installation has not taken any hits or disturbances due to the busy ruckus and high volume of shoppers at Lenox. The barricade around Spring Hiatus draws direct attention while a commanding yet quiet force protects its existence just like a mother to a child.

(Disclosure: Possible Futures provided a significant grant to this publication in September of 2010. However, the grant was given unconditionally and with the understanding that, among other reasons, “meaningful arts criticism is vital in that it challenges artists to do their best work.”)