I N T E R S T I C E: Jihyun Lee

Exhibition Dates: November 16 - December 18, 2025   

Opening Reception: Sunday November 16, 1-3pm
Artist Talk: Sunday December 7, 2pm, A conversation between Jihyun Lee and Cat Balco

Interstice is a solo exhibition of new work created in response to the galleries at 51 Trumbull by artist Jihyun Lee. A New Haven-based multidisciplinary artist, Lee’s work explores the liminal spaces between moments and the memories they eventually become – the vacuum where all times occurs and yet cannot last. What conceptual possibilities are to be found in these gaps? How might a person make meaning that lasts from a moment which cannot? How can art be used to express the neverending flow of time through our lives? This exhibit explores these essential questions through a series of paintings that invoke Medieval manuscript culture. The “Folded Hours” series reimagines the famed Spinola Book of Hours through folded time and layered memories in order to challenge us to consider our own, unceasing travail through time, place, and memory.

As illusion deepens within the painting, its flatness becomes even more pronounced. The multidimensional space on the surface unfolds into countless dimensions, revealing a quiet paradox.
Within the delicate gaps between layered spaces, I hope both the viewer’s and my own memories may seep in.
Sometimes, fragments of a fabricated past overlap with the present — This moment for the future memory.
In that overlap, I seek to paint the instant when memory rewrites the surface of time.
-Jihyun Lee

Interstice : The Space Between Time  

An image never completes itself.
It always lingers between two scenes,
between one voice and another,
remaining for a moment in the state of in-between before it fades away.
What I paint is that space of time—
the subtle tremor before memory falls silent,
the air before words take form,
the last thread of light before it disappears.
In that gap, I layer colors, twist forms,
and thinly overlay traces from different times
to create an unseen narrative.
Time does not move in a single direction;
it moves slowly back and forth
between the folded layers.
These paintings are less a record than a trace of lingering—
like the margin of an unfinished page,
stories that unfold and refold,
being born again with each turning.
There, for a brief moment,
I feel I might hold myself,
and the time we have lived.