Lily Hyon//Do Not Disturb/Come In
On view in The Nook from March 22, 2025 - April 19, 2025
Email info.thenookstl@gmail.com to make an appointment to see Lily Hyon’s project
Lily Hyon
Do Not Disturb/Come In, 2025
Silicone, latex, muslin, house paint
Dimensions Variable
Lily Hyon is a current MFA candidate at the School of Visual Arts (2025) and received her BFA in Studio Art from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis (2020).
Hyon creates silicone and latex casts of bedroom objects, body parts, packaging boxes, and costumes. Using synthetic rubbers related to performance, commodified pleasure and disposability, she examines the fetish value of objects and their parallels to comedy and horror.
About Her Work:
“My work is the love child of Halloween and Valentine’s day– props made from silicone and latex as a study of how desire is constructed and packaged through objects for one night events. Silicone and latex are synthetic rubbers associated with performance, commodified pleasure, and disposability, commonly used in the sex and theater industry. The synthetic props in my work allude to performances that happen in private and public spaces.
I’m interested in how desirability is encoded into packaging and how it shapes perceptions of the economic/fetish values attached to objects and bodies. My objects reflect on the comedy, horror and certain sadness in cheap fantasy, where the lines of private desire bleed into public domains.”
-Lily Hyon
About This Piece:
“To be invited to The Nook was to revisit St. Louis for the first time in five years. My project can be shown in two ways. It is a latex door sign with a silicone door knob– one side says Do Not Disturb, the other says Come In.
The Nook is interesting because it’s in a kitchen inside a domestic space. The architecture reads somewhere between a shrine or a small door or window that could lead to many possibilities. The thought of my work being a temporary guest staying at someone’s home inspired me to make a door sign one would see at hotels or motels. Doors, knobs, and signs are all fascinating because while they are indirectly commanding, there’s a clear power structure in a tool that can be used as a barrier that separates the semi-private and public divide. It’s somehow incredibly seductive and horrifying at the same time.
Please enjoy.”
You can find more of Lily’s work at:
Email info.thenookstl@gmail.com to make an appointment to see Lily Hyon’s project