ART-PREVIEW:Christina P. Day-Stills and Composites

New sculptural works and a large-scale installation by Christina P. Day are on presentation at Stills and Composites”, her solo exhibition at CUE Art Foundation in New York. The works were created in response to recently discovered video footage from the wedding anniversary celebration of Day’s great aunt and uncle in 1983.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: CUE Art Foundation Archive

In the celebration a home video camera was situated in the corner of the dance floor of the VFW hall, where guests repeatedly bumped into it. At times, the camera was pointed at the ceiling, or the back of a partygoer’s head. The resulting film is a fragmentary, unobstructed recording of time. For her exhibition, Day employs found materials and architectural constructions to explore this mise-en-scène, restaging the video from different perspectives. As the artist says “I multitask between drawing, drafting and building and am inspired by the poetry of time captured in found material. I frequently return to ‘match finding’ – both literally, in how repeat patterns link into one another or how two walls join on a corner, and artistically when two objects of the same make are found in different places at different times by chance. I am interested in staging uncanny installations that heighten a viewer’s sense of what may seem familiar, but is distorted out of context”. For the installation “Playbacks #1-5”, the artist extracted audio from the video, which plays on a row of five vintage Pioneer Mimi headphones. The disembodied sound of an entertainer playing love songs on a Casio keyboard echoes through the headphones, as if just on the other side of the wall. Day’s wall-mounted piece “Cascade (One’s one and only)” was inspired by the corsages and boutonnières of the guests in the video, and fashioned from the vinyl of a found seat cover. Transparent and yellowed with age, the hand-stitched flowers cast a warm glow on the gallery wall. The large-scale installation “The light I’ll be (1983)” is central to the exhibition. Composed of a white-walled cube, each side is interrupted by an impassable opening that offers a tantalizing view into the interior. Day has constructed a maze of walls and surfaces inside the cube, collapsing and manipulating the viewer’s perspective.

Info: Curator: Cecilia Alemani, CUE Art Foundation, 137 West 25th Street, Ground Floor, Between 6th and 7th Avenue, New York, Duration: 29/10-16/12/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:00, http://cueartfoundation.org