Jenny Day is a painter who divides her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico and Tucson, Arizona. She earned an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Arizona, a BFA in Painting from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a BA in Environmental Studies from the University of California Santa Cruz.
Day's work has been exhibited throughout the United States including the Elmhurst Museum, Crocker Museum, Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, Tucson Museum of Art, Davis Dominguez Gallery, Zhou B. Art Center in Chicago, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Day has attended residences at the Ucross Foundation, WY, Jentel, WY, Kimmel Harding Nelson Art Center, NE, Armory Art Center, FL, and Playa, OR.
Statement
I seek to reconcile a romantic notion of landscape with the way that space is unavoidably fragmented and eroded through conceptualization and use. Transitional localities are depicted through stratified landscape; the viewer is simultaneously confronted and enveloped by abstraction. With a background in Environmental Studies, my paintings discuss how the fractured landscape, once altered, reconstructs itself. Influenced by resource extraction, architecture, and a need to document human effect on nature, the work investigates the construction of a relationship to land, the built environment, dystopia and utopia.My most recent body of work uses satellite images from United States Superfund Sites combined with photographs shot while driving along major freeways from Los Angeles, California to Santa Fe, New Mexico. The end result depicts a landscape mediated by multiple layers of technology, a fragmented space; the work examines human demand and the effects of environmental degradation on an understanding of place.
