Hair+Nails kicks off their 2025 exhibition schedule with exhibitions by Erin Smith and Dahn Gim
HAIR+NAILS is thrilled to launch our Minneapolis 2025 programming with concurrent solo shows: Erin Smith’s Iterative Iterative Iterative along with Dahn Gim’s Names I Had You Call Me opening Saturday, February 8 and running through March 9, 2025.
Iterative Iterative Iterative will be Erin Smith’s third solo show at HAIR+NAILS. This suite of porcelain sculptures was made during her time as Artist in Residence at the prestigious John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry program. Erin spent three months on the factory floor with full access to industrial materials and equipment, working in tandem with the skilled craftspeople who make plumbing ware for Kohler Company. Erin’s artistic process combines wild experimentation with fine craftwork. The figures and forms of these porcelain works are a remix of images of her own art with pop culture + advertising icons from her youth (e.g. Max Headroom). Erin churned images through both antiquated and the newest digital tools, hand built the results in clay, and turned them into slip casting molds, allowing for multiple copies. The flat backs of the 2-dimensionally derived forms become surfaces for collision of unlikely mates. Intricate, razzle dazzle glaze work further enhances these wild and wonderful porcelain sculptures.
Dahn Gim’s Names I Had You Call Me is a series of sculptures that explores themes of identity, voice, and hybrid existence through the transformation of car mufflers into evocative forms. A series of mufflers, wrapped tightly in leather and meticulously stitched to reveal every dent and groove, take on shapes that evoke the uncanny—resembling human bodies and organs, existing as hybrid forms. This blending of the mechanical and the organic challenges the boundaries of materiality, with the processes of stretching, rubbing, cutting, sanding, and mending mirroring the tension inherent in navigating multiple identities. The mufflers, once functional objects, are recontextualized as metaphors for voices yearning to be heard yet stifled. By adding sound components, the artist invites viewers to engage with the sculptures on a physical level. The mufflers emit layered voices of women, mimicking the aggressive, persistent hum of car exhausts. This insert of humor, blended with haunting persistence, underscores the struggle to be heard, while also invoking the absurdity of trying to communicate through something as impersonal as a muffler. Each sculpture is accompanied by subtitles that catalog the multiple English names the artist adopted throughout her youth since 1999—markers of adaptation and negotiation with cultural expectations and the pressures of assimilation. These names, once tools of adaptation, embody the emotional labor of negotiating identity, navigating the desire to belong, and reconciling it with the authenticity of self-expression. The tension between the personal and the societal is reflected not only in the form of the sculptures but also in their uncanny appearance, straddling the line between the familiar and the foreign. Their distorted forms evoke a sense of discomfort and challenge the viewer to reconsider the boundaries of identity, objecthood, and belonging. The addition of humor, in the form of the mufflers' mimicry of car exhaust sounds, serves as both a playful commentary and a poignant critique of societal expectations. The viewer is prompted to lean in, to lower their body, and, in doing so, experience the labor of listening—a metaphor for the immigrant experience itself: the constant adjustments, negotiations, and compromises that come with existing within contrasting worlds. In Names I Had You Call Me, the physical act of engagement—both with the sculpture and its sound—symbolizes the ongoing struggle for recognition, understanding, and connection. The work inhabits a liminal space that resists easy categorization and challenges traditional notions of belonging, highlighting the tensions of living within multiple identities and the absurdities that arise in the process.
OPEN GALLERY HOURS
walk-ins welcome: Thursdays/Fridays/Saturdays/Sundays 1:00-5:00 starting February 9 through March 9. Also, appointments can be scheduled via hairandnailsart@gmail.com.
Image Credits:
(left) Erin Smith, Man in Vase (2023) porcelain. 28”x 25”x 12”
(right) Names I Had You Call Me — Erin + Jessica (2018) leather, mufflers, thread, audio loop.
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