Grid, Pall-Mall & Stepping-Stones

JIYON HONG

2017.03.31 - 2017.07.23 Pittsburgh Center of the Arts

In the shoe Grid, Pall-mall & Stepping-Stones, Jiyon Hong is presenting works of artist’s attempt to map the City of Pittsburg through her experience, geographical map, knowledge and shared idea of the city. Exploring ideas of disorientation and displacement, Jiyon Hong will present installation piece as well as paintings and sculptures based on elements she found in the City of Pittsburgh.

Last fall, when I was on I-376, I saw a huge, gridded scaffolding cover that covered the Liberty Bridge. To Pittsburghers, the grid pattern indicated nothing more than that the bridge was under construction. However, as a newcomer, it felt more “undecided” or “unknown,” as I had never seen the unveiled bridge as a whole. Providing restricted information–a silhouette–of a big mass by covering links to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Pont Neuf Wrapped (1975-85); this made me to consider the construction site as somewhat monumental.

Google Maps has a grid, and it also means “unknown” to me. When you search for a location, while the map image is loading, this pale colored grid appears. The gridded blocks, in sequence, eventually turn into map images. In Pittsburgh, I’d often stand in the middle of a street, staring at my cellphone, so as not to be displaced while waiting for the grid to gradually disappear and reveal the actual map. 

This show, Grid, Pall-mall and Stepping-stones started from the idea of the Grid. For outlanders, temporal existence, undecided status, hidden stories and unwarned situations that no one tells you about are all commonly experienced factors. With this uncertainty in mind, I used the elements that I had captured in the city of Pittsburgh, such as pebbles placed on Jewish gravestones, the “bridge to nowhere” that actually leads to somewhere, or traveling to Moon by taking exit 57 on I-376. The goal of my art is to depict the almost game-like process of interpreting these findings or recording a process of this process on a very personal level, without consideration of the original context of these elements. 

-Jiyon Hong