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ARTIST STATEMENT & BIO
Mel Day is an interdisciplinary Canadian artist working in San Francisco. She creates large-scale video, performance, social practice, and hybrid installations focused on the unknown, the uncertain, and the unseen, often engaging resonant contexts and time as a material. Day co-founded the Wall of Song Project (2017-), a collaborative and participatory evolving video and choral ensemble and performance series dedicated to amplifying voices in search of equity and joy. She frequently invites public participation and collaboration in projects over years and even decades.
"I’m thinking a lot about the role of uncertainty—and especially 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 family humming the same hymn at decade-long intervals. I’m really interested in co-creation and the reciprocity of hearing, looking, and seeing over years or even decades. The imperfect, stumbling sounds, which include my own, become a way to engage questions of doubt, invisibility, agency, and voice—so I work collaboratively a lot, with layers, choruses, composites. I have long experimented with combining remote experiences with “actual” live experiences and forms, often under physical or durational strain. I’m preoccupied by our tendencies to disambiguate belief and fix the image. (This can lead to manipulation and harmful effects.) I wonder about the softening of certainty as a way to hold tension and lay groundwork for deeper questioning and connecting with others across different groups, ideas, and beliefs.”
Day’s work has been shared at venues including Salesforce Tower Midnight Artist Series, Grace Cathedral, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure (San Francisco), San José Museum of Art, San José Institute of Contemporary Art (San José), Berkeley Art Museum, Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), 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 taught widely at San José State University, UC Berkeley, Santa Clara University, and the University of Toronto, Mississauga.
W: mmd.ca // IG: @mel_m_day