Part painting, part performance, part film, Painting Cathedral Rock is a quiet meditation on the unstable edges of vision, cinematic spectacle, and subjectivity. A silhouetted figure washes, cleans, and paints the iconic view of Cathedral Rock in Sedona, Arizona—a sacred Indigenous site and popular tourist destination. Ambiguous, shifting references emerge from the cinematic and spiritual to climate change and landscape painting—inviting an open-ended encounter and heightened looking beyond the squares of our current screens.

Directed, produced, edited, and performed by Mel Day with the support of the Sedona Artist Residency, Sedona Arts Center/Sedona AIR Bay Area Group organized by Melissa Wyman; Filmed at the Gretchen Warren Interfaith Chapel, Verde Valley School, Arizona; Video editing assistance: Justin Edwards; Cinematography and Sound: James Kelley for Shot by Ryan;

2026
SUNDIAL FILM FESTIVAL, Best Experimental Film Award
March 21 at 7pm, 2026, Cascade Theatre, Redding, California, Tickets and Info
LOS ANGELES INTERNATIONAL FILM SHORTS, Official Selection (March, 2026)
NEW YORK SHORTS AWARDS, Nominee
TORONTO ART FILM SPIRIT AWARDS, Nominee
CAULDRON INTERNATIONAL FILM AND VIDEO FESTIVAL, Official Selection, Salt Lake City, Utah

2025
SAN JOSE MUSEUM OF ART
Film Art / Art Film Fest
Nov. 7th, 2025

Painting Cathedral Rock, Mel Day, experimental film short, 2026 (TRT: 3:16)

In 2019, I collaborated with sports scholar Dr. Akilah Carter-Francique and San José State’s Institute for the Study of Sport, Society & Social Change to build Wall of Song's second collaborative project, FEELING GOOD. This participatory, durational project invited hundreds of fans to sing 'Feeling Good'—the song made famous by Nina Simone—as a series of collaborative and participatory art and live half-time performances dedicated to amplifying voices in women's sports' search for equity, joy and more inclusive community—particularly for BIPOC, non-binary, and transgender athletes.

The project grew over several years together and expanded to include over two dozen campus, community, and cultural affinity partners and a series of evolving video installations, limited edition prints, sculptures, and photo-based works (examples below).

Thanks to all who added their voices and made this project possible! For more information on our events, collaborators, and calls-to-action, please visit www.wallofsongproject.com.

I was honored to participate in Toronto’s V-Tape Curatorial Incubator v. 15, What the F**K?!: Video in the Age of Sublime Uncertainty, VTape, Toronto, Canada (December 1, 2019), guest mentored by Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick, alongside an inspiring international roster of curatorial participants. Out of this experience, I curated a video screening and contributed a text for the catalogue, entitled “Remote Preparation.”

“Now that my ladder’s gone / I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” 
—W. B. Yeats

Nov. 4 – Dec. 2 | Root Division, San FranciscoOpening Reception: Nov. 11, 2017, 7-10pm
Gallery Hours (or by appointment): Wednesday-Saturday, 2-6pm

Love & Longing shares descents into the unknown, artistic responses that perpetuate their own kind of fulfillment—“when the dark becomes another kind of lover” (John Tarrant). Through trying circumstances, a multiplicity of entanglements, and cascading heartbreaks, the works in Love & Longing share a sensibility fraught with loss, and reactions layered over time.

The exhibition includes works that chip—or pound—away at the wall separating art and life—that challenge, complicate, intensify, confront, and grapple with engagement and connection. Drawing upon a wide range of media and conceptual strategies—from the unflinchingly serious to the deadpan, from one-on-one to participatory encounters—the art works selected visually and aurally engage with unlikely, ungraspable hope, and a call for radical empathy and deepening relationships, in our own dark time.

VIEW LOVE AND LONGING CURATORIAL ESSAY

List of Artists:

Moir Clements (1924-2015) with Mel Day and Laurence UptonMark Clintberg
Miriam Dym
Carissa Potter Carlson
Jonn Herschend
Mark Stock (1951-2014) in collaboration with Gary Janis
Chris Komater
Kija LucasLinda Mary Montano
Jillian McDonald
EfrenAve in collaboration with Pedro Alvarez Perez
Joel Daniel Phillips
Peggy Phelan
Dario Robleto
Welcome Project

and a curated video sampler by in collaboration with
Jaime Cortez, Michelle Wilson, Christopher Scott, Nadav Assor and other guest artists TBA.

Select installation views (photo credits: Kija Lucas)

An evolving video and choral ensemble and performance of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah
Organized by artists Mel Day & Michael Namkung
wallofsongproject.com

Originally co-founded by artists Mel Day and Michael Namkung, Wall of Song Project began as a participatory, evolving video installation and live singing event that invited people—no matter their ability to carry a tune—to record themselves singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Hundreds of participants’ faces were layered together into a growing democratic chorus and video installation—such that no one voice or face stood out. In this time of great unknowing and uncertainty, this was a more permeable kind of wall that brought people together.

Launched on Inauguration Day (2017) in Washington, D.C. and at San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Wall of Song has been shared widely, recently with over 500 live and virtually present voices at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, with support from multiple organizations, donors and participants. Thank you for supporting Wall of Song!

Moir’s Series is a posthumous collaboration with my grandmother (Nan), Moir Clements (1924-2015). She was a British artist, a Warden in London during World War II, and my grandmother. She painted scenes from all parts of the British Isles, always in oil paint, and often from the front of her motor caravan. Early in her career she became discouraged after her work was repeatedly rejected from exhibitions. She never felt justified calling herself an artist, and, indeed, developed an acerbic disdain for the contemporary British art establishment.

Alongside personal and artistic insecurities and longings (she lost both parents at a young age), her greatest loss was her failing sight. Moir, as she liked to be called, collaborated with her grandson, my cousin Laurence Upton, to create a series of paintings. He painted them, according to her verbal instructions and visual memory—using yellow heavily as the color she could see most clearly. At Root Division, lying by one of these collaborative paintings is a photograph of Moir’s worn-down fuchsia Staedtler pencil. She was the last person to use this pencil until I used it to sign her name posthumously. She was always an artist and is deeply loved.

Following “Moir’s Pencil” in 2017, I created the second work in this series, “Moir’s Lipstick” in 2022. I was inspired by my published conversation with performance theorist and feminist scholar, Peggy Phelan for Danish artist Nanna Lysholt Hanson’s Dura Mater book.

A durational work started during a Residency in Sedona, Arizona in 2016: I painted a series of covers of an influential, anonymous 14th century monastic text, Cloud of Unknowing, while also practicing the meditation instructions, to the best of my ability. The project was meant to be repeated every year but after several years it eventually developed into a related video project, Painting Cathedral Rock.