Christina P. Day: Stills and Composites
Curator-Mentor: Cecilia Alemani

October 29 — December 16, 2016
Opening reception: Saturday, October 29th, 6-8PM
Artist talk: Tuesday, December 13th, 6PM

Please note the gallery will be closed for Thanksgiving holiday 11/20/16 - 11/28/16.

CUE Art Foundation is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new sculptural works and a large-scale installation by Christina P. Day. The works in Stills and Composites were created in response to recently discovered video footage from the wedding anniversary celebration of Day’s great aunt and uncle in 1983. A home video camera was situated in the corner of the dance floor of the VFW hall, where guests repeatedly bumped into it. At times, the camera was pointed at the ceiling, or the back of a partygoer’s head. The resulting film is a fragmentary, unobstructed recording of time. For her exhibition, Day employs found materials and architectural constructions to explore this mise-en-scène—restaging the video from different perspectives.

For the installation Playbacks #1-5, Day extracted audio from the video, which plays on a row of five vintage Pioneer Mimmy headphones. The disembodied sound of an entertainer playing love songs on a Casio keyboard echoes through the headphones, as if just on the other side of the wall. Day’s wall-mounted piece Cascade (One’s one and only) was inspired by the corsages and boutonnières of the guests in the video, and fashioned from the vinyl of a found seat cover. Transparent and yellowed with age, the hand-stitched flowers cast a warm glow on the gallery wall.

The large-scale installation The light I’ll be (1983) is central to the exhibition. Composed of a white-walled cube, each side is interrupted by an impassable opening that offers a tantalizing view into the interior. Day has constructed a maze of walls and surfaces inside the cube, collapsing and manipulating the viewer’s perspective. Curator Cecilia Alemani notes: “Day’s complex installations seem to also evoke a specific temporality, which proceeds with ruptures and hiatuses instead of being linear. Similar to Gordon Matta-Clark’s practice of physically altering spaces and places, Day’s artistic vocabularies challenge the sense of history and evoke a vertigo of displacement, both physical and temporal. It is a matter of a temporal tension between form and its deconstruction, between wholeness and the fragment. Day’s works vacillate between inside and outside: they are fragments of an architectural environment that appear like slices cut out from buildings. Looking at these structures, it is difficult to say whether they are in the process of being built, if they are the structural parts of a more complete work, or if they are what remains of an old family memory.”

Christina P. Day lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. She earned a BFA from the University of the Arts, and an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work has been exhibited at the Philadelphia Sculpture Gym, the Hongik Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea), the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art (Collegeville, PA), NAPOLEON (Philadelphia, PA), the Artist-Run project at the Satellite Show (Miami, FL), the Philadelphia Art Alliance, and the Woodmere Art Museum (Philadelphia, PA). She has held residencies at Sculpture Space, the Vermont Studio Center, the Haystack Mountain School of Craft, and RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residency). She is a former member of the NAPOLEON artist collective of Philadelphia (2012-2016). She teaches in the Crafts/Fiber Program at the University of the Arts (Philadelphia, PA) and is a Professor of Fiber at the Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD). 

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Art Critic Mentoring Program essay: "Testament to Long Loves" by Mimi Cheng

This exhibition is a winning selection from the 2015-16 Open Call for Solo Exhibitions. The proposal was unanimously selected by a jury comprised of panelists Cecilia Alemani, Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art; Renaud Proch, Executive Director of Independent Curators International (ICI); and Rujeko Hockley, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing the exhibition. We are honored to work with panelist Cecilia Alemani as the Curator-Mentor for this exhibition.

Photos by Jaime Alvarez

This exhibition is sponsored in part by RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residency).