Helen J Gallery is pleased to present 12-hour day – 12-hour night, a group exhibition featuring works by Spencer Carmona, Hye-Shin Chun, Michelle J Chun, Hyun Jung Jun, Nancy Kwon, Miyeon Lee, LaRissa Rogers, Dominic Terlizzi, and Cody Tumblin. Earth’s asymmetries, whether geographical or material, have astral causes. Guided by the Sun, our planet orbits on an oval trajectory, revolving on a tilted axis, protruding around its equatorial line. These eccentricities result in leap years, seasons and climate cycles of uneven length, and, most noticeably, days that are unequally light or dark. Twice a year, though, like the broken clock from the adage, the Sun’s rays face the Northern and Southern hemispheres directly, dividing daylight and nightfall into 12-hour halves. These events occur first in the Spring and then the Fall, and are marked globally by ceremonies and proceedings. Dispersed families reconvene to venerate ancestors in Korean Chuseok, old conflicts are forgiven in India’s ecstatic Holi festival, supernatural rebirth is memorialized during Easter, and Alpine livestock are elevated with floral adornments in Almatrieb parades. The world celebrates a series of short-lived but heightened symbolic corrections. This exhibition anticipates the arrival of the 12-hour day and 12-hour night, the Autumnal Equinox, and the accompanying attitudes that motivate its rites and festivals. Refrains are shared throughout the selected works – among them revivals and mutations of folk cultures, diasporic and familial fixations, astronomical observations and portents, reorderings of long-standing hierarchies, and homages to earthly and extraplanetary forces. Just as earlier societies cyclically countered the imbalances of their time, the assembled artists offer multivalent alternatives of their own.