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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 role of doubt, the uncertain, and the unseen. Day often invites public participation and collaboration in projects over years and even decades. She co-founded the Wall of Song Project (2017-), a collaborative and participatory expanding video ensemble and live half-time performance dedicated, in recent years, to amplifying voices in women’s sports’ search for equity and joy.
"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.”
My work has been shared at venues including Grace Cathedral, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), San José Museum of Art (virtually), San José Institute of Contemporary Art, 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), The Lab (SF) Djerassi Artist Program, and a Guest Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center. I hold an MFA from UC Berkeley and teach at San José State University.
W: mmd.ca // IG: @mel_m_day