Heather Day blurs lines between canvas and pixels

Anna Zorina Gallery (532 W 24th St., New York, N.Y.) presents “Convergence,” the Gallery’s first solo exhibition with Heather Day, curated by Ché Morales. Here, Day further bridges the imaginary gap between tactile and digital art while challenging the traditions of abstract expressionism.

Her paintings consist of scraped, smeared, and flooded pools of paint on heavily worn canvases stitched together. Day expands the conventional surface area of a painting, treating the backs and sides of a canvas with the same value as its façade. 

Throughout “Convergence,” on view through August 27, Heather Day uses recurrent markings and reformed canvases as atoms of an idea, free to be reconfigured, but always orbiting around one center. 

Through her latest series, Day extends her studio practice to the realm of animation for the first time. She documents a painting as it comes to life, stitching those moments together in motion and combining physically painted marks with digital brush strokes.

These animations are modified in post-production, transcending the work to a new media that blurs the line between paint and pixels. Through this process, the full lifecycle of a canvas is revealed, one that’s traditionally unseen to the viewer, but dearly familiar to the artist.  These works draw on the push and pull relationship between the desire to control repetition yet embrace its chaos as a fertile ground for ideas. By duplicating a mark, Heather Day highlights the subtle

imperfections between that mark and its predecessor creating a tension that can grow to define the piece itself. 

Together with curator Ché Morales, Day dives deeper into her creative process and grounds her work in a performative realm. Her animations are bolstered by the sonic landscape and timbre of her studio in motion, bringing a wholly new, entirely consuming experience to the viewer. 

About Heather Day

Heather Day (B. 1989, Honolulu, HI) lives and works in California. She earned a  BFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art. Day has been featured in notable  solo exhibitions with the Fort Wayne Museum of Art and Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles.

Day has completed artist residencies at Macedonia Institute, Vermont Studio Center and collaborated with both Facebook and Google, creating virtual and augmented reality works that bridge the gap between art and technology.