HEATHER DAY

Heather Day makes large-scale abstract canvases dappled with the transmuting shades of the natural world. Far from literal evocations of the infinitely mutable atmospheric conditions that she observes at dawn and dusk in her high desert studio, Day’s works take apart and reassemble the medium in order to obliquely but evocatively depict the passing of time and the shifting of seasons. Titled A Moving Window, this exhibition explores the artist’s immersion in the quotidian yet profound environmental changes that happen every day outside her window. This presentation includes a new group of works from Day’s ‘Scattering Light_’_ series, first begun in 2022, that examines the ways in which light is refracted through cloud formations. The artist probes the myriad ways that elevation and wavelength impact how this light is received by the human eye. With her saturated, pooling hues of deep red, blue, and orange, the artist interrogates how colour and light leave an emotional residue, how sensory perception is intimately entwined with memory and affect.

Working in the legacy of abstract expressionist Color Field painting, Day starts by pouring acrylic over the surface, allowing the pigment to wash and puddle. As she adds different colours, the tints spread and interact with each other, spurring alchemical interactions that are shaped by humidity and the hour of the day. Utilising supports that far exceed her own height, the artist performatively engages her compositions, continually moving and shifting the canvas, which acts as a stage for not only basins of paint, but the outsized brush marks that sweep briskly across negative space. In some stretches, Day’s stains rest thinly on the canvas, the texture of dyed fabric. In other sections, multiple layers of colouring result in thick heaps. The tension between these consistencies propels the eye around the frame, as do the final chunky dashes and scrapes of paint that dot the surface.

— Ashton Cooper, curator, writer and art historian

Press release courtesy Almine Rech