Erin Smith — Iterative Iterative Iterative
Dahn Gim — Names I Had You Call Me

HAIR + NAILS
2222 1⁄2 E. 35th St. Minneapolis, MN 55407

OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, February 8, 2025. 7:00 -10:00pm

Iterative Iterative Iterative was 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.

ARTIST BIOS:
Erin Smith (b. 1980 St. Paul MN, based in Santa Barbara CA) was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. She received her BFA in Product Design from Parsons School of Design in 2003 and an MFA in ceramics from NYS College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2021. Between degrees, Erin worked as a designer in Berlin, Germany, at Target Corporation in Minneapolis, and ran several small businesses while honing in on ceramics.
Erin was a 2018 Next Step Fund Grant recipient from the Mcknight Foundation. Exhibitions include Soap Factory, Minneapolis, MN; Concordia University, St. Paul, MN; HAIR+NAILS, Minneapolis, MN; Rochester Art Center, Rochester, MN; Cooler Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; The Center for Contemporary Crafts, Houston, TX; and Mayten’s, Ontario, Canada. Residencies include Sculpture Space, Long Island City, NY, and Arts/Industry Residency at John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI.
www.erinlynnsmith.studio Instagram: @erinlynnsmith

Born in Busan, South Korea, and raised in Canada, Dahn Gim moved to Los Angeles in 2013 and is currently based in Minneapolis. Her work reflects the dual perspectives of being both an insider and an outsider, intricately woven into the tapestry of her life as a “forever foreigner,” shaped by the nomadic ebb and flow of perpetual immigrant status. Exploring the complexities of hybrid identity, Gim engages with various materials to grapple with the friction and fragmentation of assimilation and dislocation. Deeply informed by self-inquiry during times of dispersion, uncertainty, and a longing for belonging, she transmutes her ideas across multiple mediums, including video, sculpture, participatory drawings, durational performance, and installation.
After completing her MFA in Media Arts at UCLA, Gim has exhibited her work at prominent venues in Los Angeles, including the Hammer Museum, Steve Turner Gallery, AA|LA, Human Resources, Barnsdall Art Gallery, Gas Gallery, Camera Obscura Art Lab, Kala Art Institute, Brand Art
Library, and Angels Gate Cultural Center. She has also shown her work internationally at venues such as Somerset House (UK), Post Territory Ujeongguk, Space One, Dongdaemun Design Plaza (South Korea), Basis (Frankfurt); Rabindranath Tagore Centre (India) and ifa-laboratory (Belgium). Additionally, she has participated in various international art festivals, including Currents New Media, the UCLA Game Art Festival, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Other Places Art Fair, Now Instant Image Hall, and the LA Art Book Fair at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, as well as Art Souterrain and Now Play This at Somerset House. Recently, Gim was awarded the 2024 McKnight Visual Artists Fellowship.
www.dahngim.com
Instagram: @dahngim