Whistle + Shipwreck / Fat Chance Series
Whistle + Shipwreck (Fat Chance), Mel Day, video and sound work, 2006: screening installation at Headlands Center for the Arts Project Space (2006); group exhibition at Spur Projects, Portola Valley (2006); solo exhibition at Peak Gallery, Toronto (2007)
Fat Chance, 2012, Headlands Center for the Arts (Gym installation), By Mel Day and Jeanne C. Finley with original sound score and narration by Pamela Z
Fat Chance, Mel Day and Jeanne C. Finely with an original sound score by Pamela Z, two-channel video and experimental film, 2012. This collaborative version of Fat Chance by Day, Finley, and Pamela Z was installed as a work-in-progress at the Gym (two-channel installation), and at the Open House (film), Headlands Center for the Arts, in 2012.
Fat Chance at Rodeo Beach, June 2005 (Mel Day)
Whistle + Shipwreck, 2005, Mel Day, video and sound installation
In the single channel installation and short film, Whistle + Shipwreck, the layered sounds of my sister whistling a hymn in and out of sync with herself are paired with a sequence of footage of a shipwrecked sailboat (Fat Chance) that I came across early one morning while on a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2005.
Shortly after pairing the footage and whistling together, I found a blog detailing a tragic series of events. This blog was shared with the video work and embedded in the back of a related “Shipwreck-less” series of paintings. Part photograph, part oil paint, the shipwreck is all but painted away, leaving only the shadow of the sailboat on the beach. Touched and untouched, known and not known, these works are a meditation on incomprehensible loss and mourning.
Fat Chance, 2012, Mel Day & Jeanne C. Finely with an original sound score by Pamela Z, two-channel video and experimental film
I shared what I had witnessed on the beach later that day with another artist-in-residence, Jeanne C. Finley and she went down to film the boat the following day. A number of years later, I reached out to her to see what had happened, and discovered that she had filmed Fat Chance as it was being towed out to sea. We decided to pair our shared footage together as part of a two-channel work with an original sound score and narration by Pamela Z . This piece was developed with the support of an Alumni New Works Award from the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2012. View Fat Chance fine cut film clip
An additional film version incorporating an interview with the crew was developed by Jeanne C. Finley in collaboration with Mel Day, with narration and an original sound score by Pamela Z.
All these works were developed in honor of the Fat Chance crew.
Globe and Mail Review: Melissa Day at Peak Gallery
Saturday, January 06, 2007 by Gary Michael Dault
Melissa Day’s beautiful exhibition Certain Insecurity is a mystery wrapped in an enigma and further bound by an aching, haunting poignancy that is both distressing and ennobling. The exhibition is built around the video work Whistle and Shipwreck, a split-screen projection. On the left screen, a wrecked sailboat (named Fat Chance) sits crumpled on the beach, the surf pounding in all around it, while, on the right screen, a young woman (Day’s sister) whistles a familiar hymn (Great Is Thy Faithfulness). The juxtaposition of the now derelict boat and the halting, imperfect whistling –a kind of benediction borne on the wind — is remarkably moving. And it gets even more moving to learn that Day, who now lives in San Francisco, had planned to write the words “Save Me” in the sand, in the course of walking one morning on California’s Rodeo Beach in the Marin Headlands, only to come upon the wreck instead. And it was only after her bringing the two sequences together (the wrecked sailboat and the whistling), that she discovered a blog on the Internet (now available in the gallery) that outlines, in painful detail, the circumstances of a tragedy (a 15-year-old boy on a sea journey with his dad had been swept overboard and drowned only a few hours before Day’s walk on the beach).
Mel Day, Shipwreck-less, digital pigment print and oil paint on canvas, 3 x 5′, 2007 (Installation View, Peak Gallery, 2007)
The rest of this thoughtful and blessedly unsentimental exhibition is made up of paintings, or, more accurately, of digital-pigment prints overpainted with oils, one of which shows the Golden Gate bridge (almost an incarnation, for Day, of “certain insecurity”), which Day has almost entirely painted out, leaving only a sort of visual murmur of its soaring piers and, in the foreground, of its reflection. Another painting/print, Shipwreck, is also a large photograph of the doomed Fat Chance lying on its side but, as with the Golden Gate, almost entirely painted out, so that only a ghostly mast and a watery reflection on the beach remain: the image as recollection merely.
