Niro
Hyeree Ro
September 27 - December 7, 2024
Opening, September 27th, 6-8pm
Free, RSVP
Niro is a newly commissioned installation by Hyeree Ro that explores themes of loss, mobility, invisibility, and intimacy. The installation will center around a skeletal sculpture of a Kia Niro, the car driven by the artist’s late father. Niro activates this framework as an allusion to boundaries between father and daughter, and moments that are physically and metaphorically shared and spent apart in relation to the bounds of the vehicle.
The scaffold-like car structure, constructed from thin wood strips and aluminum, blurs boundaries between interior and exterior, presenting the car as a site that is both public and private. Viewers will be invited to enter the sculpture to experience an audio recording of a fourteen-hour road trip to Niagara Falls taken by the artist earlier in the summer. A new video work centered on bodies of water features a soundscape composed of interviews Ro conducted with friends, where they shared their experiences of crossing the Pacific Ocean. Compiled together and played simultaneously, the installation’s audiovisual components flow as a stream of consciousness that carries the viewer amidst Ro’s gathered memories and reflections.
Ro will activate the Niro sculpture through movement and a fragmented multilingual monologue. Engaging the sculpture while repeating words, gestures, and sounds, the performance will deconstruct and reconstruct both the physical vehicle and the artist’s relationship with her father, carrying the viewer within a meandering stream of memory that shifts and flows as the artist moves and reorders the sculpture and other objects in the space. Performances are scheduled for October 5th, November 7th, and December 7th, 2024.
Curated by Maya Hayda.
Special thanks to The Jenni Crain Foundation for additional exhibition support.
Hyeree Ro would like to thank her friends—Rebecca Yeong Ae Mzengi Corey, Lulu Yao Gioiello, Sae Jun Kim, Christina Yuna Ko, Annie Ling, Anne Wu, Lucas Yasunaga—for their trust and for sharing their stories; Maya Hayda, Caroline Shehan, Andrew Lee, and the install crew—Matthew, Corbin, Tin, Geetha, Jenny, and Gus—for their care and support; and a special thanks to Armando Cortés for his invaluable support on this project.
Hyeree Ro (b. 1987) is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York and Seoul, primarily working with sculptural objects and multilingual fractured narrative-based performance. Her practice is informed by her experience as a child of an immigrant growing up in California as well as her subsequent returns to Korea as a teenager and then to the US as an international student. As a constant migrant passing through various immigrant statuses and encountering disparities in class and wealth, Ro interweaves her family history, places, language, body, movement, and stories into her practice. She attended Korea National University of Arts (BFA, 2017) and Yale School of Art (MFA in Sculpture, 2021). She has exhibited at MMCA National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Cheongju, Korea), SVA CP Project Space (New York, NY), Keepsake Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Leeum Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea), Korean Culture Centre (Ottawa, Canada), and Akiyoshidai International Art Village (Mine, Japan) amongst others. Recent projects include: “lunares” (2024, FAR-NEAR), “Falls” (2022, Leeum Museum of Art). She is also the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant (2023), The Jenni Crain Foundation Grant (2024), and Susan H. Whedon Award (2021). Her projects have been supported by Arts Council Korea (2022), Seoul Foundation of Arts and Culture (2017, 2022, 2023, 2024), Korea Arts Management Service (2023), and Mondriaan Fund (2024).
