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)

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.