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ARTIST STATEMENT
Mel Day is an interdisciplinary Canadian artist working in San Francisco. Her practice spans immersive video, performance, social engagement, and hybrid installations exploring the unknown, uncertain, and unseen. She often engages resonant contexts, rituals, and time as a material and invites public participation and collaboration in moving image installations, over years and even decades. She co-founded the Wall of Song Project (2017-), an evolving video installation and live performance series dedicated to connecting voices in search of equity and joy.
"I’m thinking a lot about the role of doubt and uncertainty—especially through the harmonies and dissonances of collective, everyday singing: a marine veteran rolls down a hill while singing a hymn about peace anything but peacefully; a couple treads water while singing until exhaustion; a durational video layers clips of my large family humming the same hymn at decade-long intervals. I’m preoccupied by our tendencies to disambiguate belief and fix the image. (This can lead to manipulation and harmful effects.) So I work a lot with layers, choruses, and composites. I’m focused on co-creation and the reciprocity of seeing, hearing, and looking. Ambiguous gestures and imperfect, stumbling sounds, which include my own, become a way to engage questions of doubt, invisibility, agency, and voice. I wonder about the softening of certainty as a way to hold tension and lay groundwork for deeper questioning and reflecting across different groups, ideas, and beliefs.”
BIO
Mel Day’s work has been exhibited and screened at venues including Grace Cathedral, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Salesforce Tower Artist Midnight Series, Southern Exposure (San Francisco), San José Museum of Art, San José Institute of Contemporary Art (San José), Berkeley Art Museum, and internationally. Honors include the Silicon Valley Artist Laureate Nexus Award, Headlands Center for the Arts Alumni New Works Award and UC Berkeley Fellowship, an Experimental Media Arts Residency at Stanford University, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus (Germany), a collaborative residency at The Lab (SF), Djerassi Artist Program, and a Guest Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center. Day holds an MFA from UC Berkeley with a year’s exchange scholarship to Glasgow School of Art and Glasgow University in Scotland. She has held Adjunct Faculty positions at San José State University, UC Berkeley, Santa Clara University, and the University of Toronto, Mississauga.
W: mmd.ca // IG: @mel_m_day