Mel Day’s interdisciplinary work probes our individual and collective wanderings when our belief systems—of all kinds—falter and our questions deepen. Ancient mystics called this radical dread. Exploring radical dread, Day believes, leads us away from formulaic truths and draws us towards paradox, empathy, and sincerity of heart. Her multi-media contemplative experiments—including immersive film and sound installations, group study guides, form-free transformative encounters, drawings, design thinking collaborations, and photo-based works—probe what’s at stake with our ideas of truth, how we function with what we understand to be true, and how it’s all too possible for things to be other than what we believe. Her work invites the viewer to draw upon their own experiences in making meaning of the work and seeks to lay groundwork for a dialogue across potentially insular groups and ideas.
Mel Day is a Canadian-British artist currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Day’s work has been featured both nationally and internationally at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure Art Gallery, San Francisco Film Society, The Berlin Office in Germany, Peak Gallery in Toronto, Pacific Film Archive and Berkeley Art Museum and Santa Clara University. Recent residencies include Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus Residency (Schwandorf, Germany), Headlands Center for the Arts Alumni New Works Award and MFA Fellowship, Stanford University’s Experimental Media Arts Lab, Djerassi Resident Artist Program and a collaborative residency at The Lab, SF. Day was recently recognized for her experimental collaborative design work by OpenIDEO. She has also received awards from San Francisco Foundation’s Murphy Fellowship in the Fine Arts, Eisner Prize in the Creative Arts from UC Berkeley, Sam Francis Distinguished Alumni Award and an Explorations Award from the Canada Council. She has been a visiting lecturer at Santa Clara University, UC Berkeley, and the University of Toronto & Sheridan College. Day holds an MFA from UC Berkeley and a BFA from Queen’s University, Canada, with a year’s study at the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland.
Fat ChanceFilm & Installation Series of Works: Whistle + Shipwreck, Mel Day, single channel projection with sound (2006); Fat Chance collaboration with Jeanne C. Finley with original score and narration by Pamela Z, two-channel video installation and film (2012) http://www.mmd.ca/wp/project/whistle-shipwreck/
Interdisciplinary Artist Mel Day is excited to announce that, with the collaborative efforts of OpenIDEO + Djerassi Resident Artists Program, her recently awarded OpenIDEO Young Artists Fellowship Pilot Program will take place at Djerassi in the Fall of 2015.
OpenIDEO, an online global platform for social and environmental good, recently awarded Day's concept—one of nine winning ideas from over 600 concepts and 1100 inspirations—as a result of the IDEO-sponsored challenge to cultivate creative confidence in young people. This unique, community-based residency is designed to cultivate and make space and time for the creative confidence of young people by building upon the network of existing local, national and international artist residencies. Our inaugural resident is interdisciplinary artist Melissa Wyman. Ms. Wyman was been selected to collaborate with local East Palo Alto high school youth. In the context of Djerassi’s internationally recognized collegial and interactive environment, the young people and artist will co-author a creative work which will be presented to the local community.
Special thanks to Margot Knight, the Director of Djerassi and to all the collaborators at OpenIDEO who helped Day interview end-users, generate prototypes, design visuals, and refine the overall concept to make this initiative possible.
Art/Life Counseling with Linda Mary Montano by Mel Day recently published in Journal of Performing Arts: Day's blog entry for the Performance Studies International Conference held at Stanford University in June 2013 was recently published in Performance Research: A Journal in the Performing Arts, edited by Branislav Jakovljevic & Lindsey Mantoan and published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, Volume 19, Issue 3: On Time. You can read about Day's extraordinary experience with Linda Mary Montano's work at the PSI conference here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13528165.2014.935194#.VIIF3b6B3D1 or http://www.mmd.ca/wp/2013/06/30/psi-stanford-university/.
