Curated by Jim Campbell Studios,

Throughout the month of February, the ‘Salesforce Tower Midnight Artist Series’ features SLOP, by Mel Day and Frank Ham, a human-coded, black-and-white simulation exploring the entangled tension between art and technology through shifting Rorschach-style visuals combining computational fluid dynamics and economic data.

SLOP highlights both the criticized chaos of AI output and the confusion created by human demands for certainty and strict boundaries, or immiscible divisions. The work invites viewers to contemplate the chaos and uncertainty of both AI and human systems in an uncertain, open-ended encounter beyond the squares of our current screens.

Through Day and Ham’s respective fields of art and computational fluid dynamics (CFD), the two explore the reciprocity of looking and seeing simultaneously through our physical eye, mind’s eye, and the remote, technically adjacent ‘eye’—its so-called ‘digital twin’.

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)

An extension of my Wall of Song ‘Feeling Good’ project, QUEERBALL is a custom, limited edition basketball celebrating and advocating for women’s sports and the 50th Anniversary of Title IX—particularly for non-binary and transgender athletes. Signed by the San José State Women’s Basketball Team each year since 2022, this series exists as a durational, limited-edition object, participatory installation, 360 video, and photo-based work. QUEERBALL developed out of my Wall of Song project collaborations with sports scholar Dr. Akilah Carter-Francique, the renowned SJSU Institute for the Study of Sport, Society and Social Change, and over two dozen community partners from 2019-2022.

Originally conceived as an interactive installation in Wall of Song’s exhibition at the Natalie & James Thompson Gallery at SJSU in 2022, QUEERBALL was recently shown as a photo-based work at the SF MOMA Steps Cafe “Fan Art” show—an extension of SFMOMA’S ‘Get in the Game’ exhibition.

Photo-based work exhibited at Steps Cafe, SFMOMA
Fan Art: Bay Area Sports
October 10, 2024–April 15, 2025

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. 

Doxology, 10 years later (+/-), is an evolving, multi-channel video project depicting each member of Day’s large family humming a hymn in essentially the same way every decade. The latest two-channel version was filmed in 2005 and 2015. Day plans to film her family humming a third time 10 years from now—and again, 20 years on, etc. This video and audio family portrait is a meditation on the ungraspable and shifting language of belief and doubt and the artist’s own ability to continue to make work. An exploration of individual and collective transformation on a number of levels—family, gallery/film, and curatorial relationships—absences will signify those no longer with us or perhaps those who refuse to or can’t participate. Technology changes and Day’s own growth as an artist will inevitably alter each successive screening/installation.

Each family member is filmed individually and left alone while humming. Each person is asked to hum the hymn as he or she would sing it. Layered together, their voices are both dissonant and harmonious. It is hard to tell when one person stops humming and another begins. A half-language emerges, somewhere between knowing and not knowing.

Featuring (in order of appearance): Rossalyn Day, Rachel Day, Mel Day, Bethany Day, Alan Day, Alasdair Day, Roderick Day (2015) Giles Day, Lynne Day, Rowena Day, Catriona Day

The Young Artists' Fellowship at Djerassi, is an experimental design and social engagement project born out of close collaboration with OpenIDEO, an online, global platform for social and environmental good, and the support of Djerassi Resident Artist Program. Our initiative was awarded by IDEO and YMCA challenge sponsors in 2013, and we are now excited to announce that our Pilot Youth Fellowship at Djerassi Resident Artists Program launches this fall with high school students from East Palo Alto School, Eastside College Prep, Palo Alto's Gunn High school, and our inaugural artist, Melissa Wyman.

We are honored to have our pilot residency supported by Djerassi Resident Artist Program, The Lava Thomas and Peter Danzig Fellowship and the Silicon Valley Creative Impact & Audience Engagement Grant by the Applied Materials Foundation. For more info and updates, check out the new website for the pilot program at Djerassi with resident artist, Melissa Wyman: http://youngartistsfellowship.tumblr.com

"Linda Mary Montano Art / Life Counseling." Journal of the Performing Arts: On Time, Volume 19, No.3 (June 2014), Published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, Edited by Branislav Jakovljevic & Lindsey Mantoan

Art / Life Counseling with Linda Mary Montano describes my extraordinary experience with Linda Mary Montano's work at Stanford's PSi conference. It was originally published as part of the PSI Performance Blog. You can also read the piece here on Linda Mary Montano's blog.

The piece was originally written while I was a participating artist in the Performance Research International Conference: NOW THEN: PERFORMANCE & TEMPORALITY, at Stanford University.