Painting Cathedral Rock, Experimental Film / Video Installation

PRESS RELEASE / PRESS KIT WITH IMAGES / ARTIST STATEMENT

Painting Cathedral Rock, Mel Day, single-channel video installation/experimental film short, 2025 (video still; TRT: 3:17)

**PRESS KIT WITH IMAGES** / **ARTIST STATEMENT**
New Award-Winning Experimental Short Film Examines the Unstable Edges of Vision, Cinematic Spectacle, Belief, Invisibility, and Climate Change at Sedona’s Iconic Cathedral Rock
**SAN FRANCISCO, CA, June 2026** — Contemporary artist Mel Day’s latest award-winning site-specific work, *Painting Cathedral Rock*, is a compelling fusion of video, performance, and painting that explores the shifting boundaries of perception, belief, invisibility, and environmental vulnerability.
Filmed at the Gretchen Warren Interfaith Chapel in Sedona, Arizona—centered on the revered vista of Cathedral Rock, a sacred Indigenous site and popular “vortex” destination—Day’s piece unfolds in two evocative acts. In the first, the artist meticulously washes and cleans the chapel altar window, gradually revealing the iconic landscape beyond. The second act sees Day painting the window with a blend of red earth sourced from the surrounding terrain, simultaneously concealing and unveiling the landscape, and dimming the chapel’s interior light. This ritualistic gesture invites viewers to contemplate the duality of sight and the act of looking, while evoking themes of erasure and revelation.
Day’s experimental short, *Painting Cathedral Rock*, won the Sundial Film Festival Best Experimental Film Award in 2026 and Best Experimental from Independent Women Film Awards (2026). The film has also received Official Selections from Cauldron International Film and Video Festival (2026), Los Angeles International Film Shorts (2026), Atlanta Experimental Film Festival, and nominations from New York Shorts Awards (2026), Toronto’s Art Film Spirit Awards (2026), Berlin Indie Film Festival (2026), and Dumbo Film Festival (2026).
*Painting Cathedral Rock* was produced with the support of Sedona Artist Residency, Sedona Arts Center, and Verde Valley School. The work is directed, performed, and edited by Mel Day. Cinematography and sound editing by James Kelley and video editing assistance by Justin Edwards.
**BACKGROUND**
Day initiated *Painting Cathedral Rock* during her 2016 Summer Artist Residency at Sedona Arts Center’s Verde Valley School. Inspired by “The Cloud of Unknowing,” a radical 14th-century spiritual text advocating connection to the divine through love, rather than knowledge, immersive readings of the text, and through daily meditative walks to the Gretchen Warren Interfaith Chapel, Day grappled with the layered symbolism of the window—its cinematic frame, its overlap with colonial histories, and its relationship to landscape painting and climate change. “I found myself visually consternated by the colliding references and shifting, complexly layered contexts,” Day remarks. “I decided to create *Painting Cathedral Rock* as a quiet meditation and ritualistic exploration of looking with heightened care and deepening attention.”
Originally conceived as a three-part performance—washing, painting, and cleansing—the work evolved over nearly a decade. Day ultimately distilled the piece into a two-part, single-channel video, reflecting on the complexities of viewing, responsibility, and the coded histories embedded within the act of looking. “The third section, a cleansing, felt wrong—too redemptive, too easy,” Day notes. “Returning to it in 2025, I understood that the unresolved middle was the work: what we are entitled to look at, what we are responsible to in our looking, what is already encoded there. My own spiritual ‘unknowing’ had opened, slowly, into a reckoning with other kinds of unknowing.”
**///**
Mel Day, *Painting Cathedral Rock*, 2026 (TRT: 3:17)
**Credits:**
Directed, performed, and edited by Mel Day
Video Editing Assistance: Justin Edwards
Cinematography & Sound: James Kelley
Thanks to the support of: *Melissa Wyman, organizer of Sedona AIR Bay Area group* and 2016 AIR participants (Michael Namkung, Amanda Curreri, Llewelynn Fletcher, Lukaza Brandman-Verrisimo, Grace Rosario Perkins, José Luis Iñiguez, Cara Levine, Weston Teruya, Melissa Wyman)
*Carol Holyoake*, Manager, Sedona Arts Center
*Eric Holowacz*, Executive Director, Sedona Arts Center
*Paul Amadio*, Head of Verde Valley School
*Sedona Arts Center*
**For media inquiries, exhibition information, or viewing requests, please contact:**
Mel Day, Mel Day Studio
melissa@mmd.ca
Wendy Norris, Norris Communications
wendy@norriscommunications.biz; (415) 307-3853
//
**2026**
**SUNDIAL FILM FESTIVAL:** ***Best Experimental Film Award***
March 21 at 7pm, 2026, Cascade Theatre, Redding, California, Tickets and Info
**LA INDEPENDENT WOMEN FILM AWARDS: Best Experimental Award** (Screening TBA)
**NEW YORK INDEPENDENT WOMEN FILM FESTIVAL:** *Official Selection (June 30, 2026)*
**DEFY FILM FESTIVAL, Nashville, TN**: *Official Selection (August 21-22nd, 2026)*
**CAULDRON INTERNATIONAL FILM AND VIDEO FESTIVAL,** *Official Selection*
June 24-26th,Salt Lake City, Utah
**BERLIN INDIE FILM FESTIVAL:** Nominee
**NEW YORK SHORTS AWARDS:** *Nominee*
**TORONTO ART FILM SPIRIT AWARDS***: Nominee*
**ATLANTA EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL:** *Official Selection (July 10, 2026)*
**DUMBO FILM FESTIVAL:** *Semi-finalist*
**2025**
**SAN JOSE MUSEUM OF ART: Film Art / Art Film Fest**
Nov. 7th, 2025

Painting Cathedral Rock

ARTIST STATEMENT

To force the fundamental invisibility of exterior things till the very invisibility itself becomes a thing" —Oppenheim, Lois. The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett's Dialogue with Art. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000.

I began Painting Cathedral Rock in 2016 as part of an artist residency at Sedona Arts Center, alongside dozens of poets and performers from across the US. At that time, I was deep in a body of work inspired by The Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th-century monk's radical proposition that connection to the divine comes through experiential presence, self-forgetting, and a negation of mental concepts and words.

I began a devotional practice and studio ritual while I was there. I read the text daily and followed its meditative instructions. I also worked on painting a copy of “The Cloud of Unknowing’s” book cover as faithfully as I could and attempted to practice the meditation instructions at the nearby Gretchen Warren Interfaith Chapel. At the Chapel, a large window—the shape of a movie screen, positioned exactly where an altar would be—frames Cathedral Rock directly. Sacred Indigenous site, tourist "vortex" destination, cinematic spectacle: I found myself visually and ethically consternated by the colliding references and realities. Trying to sit inside that instability rather than resolve it, a performance emerged.

The piece was initially created in three ritualistic parts: In part one, I wash and clean the chapel window. In part two, I paint the window entirely with a mix of the red earth from the surrounding landscape, both concealing and revealing the landscape, and dimming the light within the chapel. In part three, I wash off the mud paint, which slowly drips, blurs, and ambiguously merges with the landscape.

After the 2016 election, I couldn't finish the video of this performance. The third section, a cleansing, felt wrong—too redemptive, too easy. I set the project aside for nearly a decade though continued to paint “Cloud of Unknowing” covers, which have grown into a small series. Following an impulse to return to the film in 2025, I understood that the unresolved middle is the work, a window framing what we are entitled or allowed to look at, what we are responsible to in our looking, what is already encoded there—white supremacy, colonialism, erasure, unsettled histories, precarious lands.

My spiritual "unknowing" had opened, slowly, into a reckoning with other kinds of unknowing, with heightened awareness of my own white blind spots, complicit in that history. And then: the accelerating assault on public lands, Indigenous sovereignty, and the question of who the land is even for—what counts as public, who decides, whose access, whose sacred. The final edit removed the cleansing section entirely. Some of my projects surprise me with their duration. Perhaps Painting Cathedral Rock will call me back in another ten years.

MEL DAY