episode n°5.
Juyon Lee
Parabolic Traces
July 12–August 29, 2025
episode is pleased to announce its fifth exhibition Parabolic Traces, the first New York solo exhibition by Seoul-born, Brooklyn-based artist Juyon Lee. Working across photography, video, glass, light, and neon, Lee collects fragments of the intimate and impermanent—personal, digital, and transient—and reconfigures them into sculptural compositions. From screen captures to passing landscapes, each image is stretched, layered, and transformed to hold moments that resist resolution, yet persist in form and sensation.
The title Parabolic Traces evokes multiple layers of meaning. Rooted in the curvature of a parabola—a shape that links points across space and time—it also draws from the scientific language of signals, receivers, and interference patterns. In this context, Lee’s sculptural surfaces operate like receivers—capturing and refracting transmissions, some intact, others interrupted—into visual echoes that evade fixed interpretation. This interplay of form and flux mirrors how impressions reverberate in nonlinear patterns, much like signals bouncing within a parabolic reflector.
The exhibition presents seven new works composed of photographic decal, slumped glass, mirrorized glass, and neon. Each begins with an image from Lee’s phone archive—screenshots from video calls with her grandmother, photos from airplane windows, or moments suspended in transit. These fragments are layered into composite surfaces, processed, and transferred onto glass. Through kiln firing, the glass warps and distorts—fixing fleeting images in a material responsive to light, pressure, and time. For Lee, who has long engaged with immaterial elements such as air, light, and sound, glass offers a paradox: a medium that reveals even as it unsettles. It mediates between clarity and distortion, solidity and impermanence. In some works, neon glows softly through textured surfaces, amplifying the sense of spatial and emotional ambiguity.
Lee’s personal history threads through the work. Raised in Seoul by her grandmother, she moved alone at age ten to join her mother in suburban Boston—a rupture across generations, language, and place that continues to reverberate in her practice. The recent passing of her grandfather drew her gaze inward, toward her grandmother, whom she calls "Umni," a regional variation of the Korean word for mother. One work in the exhibition, Parabolic Traces 3 (Where her urn will be & Plane view descending over New York City at night) (2025), overlays a descending flight’s view of Manhattan with the projected site of her grandmother’s future resting place beside her grandfather’s. It holds the weight of what is to come—an unease shaped not by memory, but by the inevitability of future loss.
Parabolic Traces lingers in the space where impressions shift—surfacing not as events, but as changes in tone, texture, and light. Installed in a street-facing window, the works shift with the day: absorbing changing light, refracting sidewalk movement, and casting a soft glow into the night. These surfaces do not preserve moments; they hold their echoes. Across long summer days and brief, luminous nights, they offer a quiet disorientation—where presence flickers, and what we try to hold lingers briefly in light before fading.
Juyon Lee (b.1995, Seoul, South Korea; lives and works in in Brooklyn) grew
up between Seoul and the greater Boston area. This experience shaped her
interest in spatial and temporal dissonance and the ephemeral nature of being. She explores the idea of transience and fluidity in perception
and meaning-making process by weaving images into multidimensional works
composed of architectural elements, functional and nonfunctional objects with
ethereal materials like light and air.
Lee has exhibited widely, including Tufts University Art Galleries, New Bedford Art Museum, episode gallery, Jewett Arts Center, and NARS Foundation. She is the recipient of notable fellowships and awards, including the Bronx Museum AIM Fellowship, The Café Royal Cultural Foundation Grant, Art Alliance of Contemporary Glass Visionary Scholarship, St. Botolph's Emerging Artist Award, and Pilchuck Glass School Fellowship. She participated in artist residencies at LMCC Arts Center, The Studios at MASS MoCA, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Vermont Studio Center, and more. Lee holds her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and her BA from Wellesley College (summa cum laude).
Lee has exhibited widely, including Tufts University Art Galleries, New Bedford Art Museum, episode gallery, Jewett Arts Center, and NARS Foundation. She is the recipient of notable fellowships and awards, including the Bronx Museum AIM Fellowship, The Café Royal Cultural Foundation Grant, Art Alliance of Contemporary Glass Visionary Scholarship, St. Botolph's Emerging Artist Award, and Pilchuck Glass School Fellowship. She participated in artist residencies at LMCC Arts Center, The Studios at MASS MoCA, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Vermont Studio Center, and more. Lee holds her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and her BA from Wellesley College (summa cum laude).
Image courtesy of the artist and episode, NY. Photography by Archtechtonic.