
Time has operated unusually for many of us over the past few years; slowly attenuated, strangely accelerated, or slipping backwards and forward in our memory. The regimented tick of seconds and minutes of Greenwich meantime seems incommensurate with our inner durations. In Jeena Shin’s twin series of paintings, this feeling for alternate temporalities reflects a holding pattern of a kind. From 2020 to 2022 Shin has been living closely with her paintings, while periodically our exterior lives dissolve and we find ourselves doing and undoing. Shin’s forms hold us carefully in time as each figure in a painting holds the memory of the figure before and the potential next step in the sequence. In another sense, Shin is also held to the template’s unfurling; the time before, the time now, the time after, exist simultaneously in the system that has generated these series of works.
Jeena Shin’s paintings critically examine the spatial properties that inhere in a reticulated network of fold lines. They also probe the visual and spatial resonances produced by varying the intensities of a single colour. Her works acknowledge that colour is deceptive, relative, and duplicitous. The artist is keenly aware of what Josef Albers has already noted, ‘with colour we do not see what we see. Because colour, as the most relative medium in art has innumerable faces or appearances’.

Two Rooms is a contemporary art exhibition venue located in a converted warehouse in Central Auckland, New Zealand. Opened in August 2006, Two Rooms presents a program of residencies and projects by leading International and New Zealand contemporary artists. The building houses two exhibition spaces, the Project Room and the Long Room.

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