Christina P. Day: Depth Cue

Experimental Gallery, lower level

For Depth Cue the artist has created a meticulously constructed space within a space and then, just as carefully, structured the viewer’s visual access to this environment. The arrangements of clothing and other items in this otherwise unassuming room evoke a multitude of untold stories. A typewritten copy of a poem, framed on the wall. A small balloon, a token of care and concern, tucked away on a shelf. A stack of jigsaw puzzles, neatly gathering dust.

The viewer’s visual perspective on these details is strategically framed and intentionally limited. The walls that encase the installation position visitors as interlopers, peering through narrow windows and doors left slightly ajar. The need to peer past multiple thresholds to get a better view only increases the desire to look, inevitably evoking a sense of voyeurism. The constricted visibility of the work, as well as the age of the items inside, also ties the work to memory. Some aspects of the room are fully visible and clear. Others recede into shadow or are blocked from view entirely. The scene is locked in time, a physical experience that approximates the simultaneously vivid and obscured nature of memory.

Like her architectural installations, Day’s cut linoleum pieces also act, as the artist describes them, as “repositories for both time and lived experience.” The works are hand-cut from salvaged linoleum fragments and give new life to forgotten materials and styles. From a distance, the wear and tear on the linoleum takes on the appearance of an impressionistic blur, as if the works and the materials they’re made from are being viewed through the fog of memory.

Christina P. Day: Depth Cue takes place as part of MoCA Arlington’s SOLOS 23-24, a series of solo exhibitions by artists based in the Mid-Atlantic taking place at the Museum throughout 2023 and 2024. The exhibitions were selected from an open call by a jury that included artist Nekisha Durrett, Betsy Johnson, assistant curator, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and Jova Lynne, director, Temple Contemporary, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University.

CHRISTINA P. DAY
b. 1977, Ridgewood, NJ
Lives and works between Philadelphia, PA & Baltimore, MD

Christina P. Day’s art practice recontextualizes roles related to material lifespan: designer, fabricator, owner, maintainer. Her improvisational building language stems from textile design strategy and is focused on the conversation of material as content. Her work takes form in architectural installation, surfacing methods, textile pattern logic and physical match finding.

Day is a full-time faculty member of the Fiber Department at Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD), where her teachings focus on cloth production methods and experimental fashion. She has been awarded residencies at Sculpture Space, Vermont Studio Center, Haystack Open Studios, RAIR, and MASS MoCA and will be participating in this year’s cohort of the Maker-Creator Fellowship at Winterthur. Recent exhibitions and research on material history have been completed at Fleisher Art Memorial (Philadelphia, PA), Hagley Museum and Library (Wilmington, DE) and Kirkcaldy Museum (Kirkcaldy, Scotland).

Related Events

Art After Hours
Friday / June 2 / 5pm-8pm

Artist Talk: Christina P. Day
Saturday / July 8 / 1pm

Christina P. Day: Depth Cue press coverage
In the Galleries: Day & Wanna
The Washington Post