Jenny Day ||| Our Shared Disaster

JONATHAN FERRARA GALLERY is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Tucson-based artist Jenny Day, entitled Our Shared Disaster. As the award winner of the 2017 NO DEAD ARTISTS Juried Exhibition, Day presents eight new paintings reminiscent of her earlier landscape work but now in a more fragmented and abstracted composition. The exhibition will be on view from 31 May through 14 July 2018 with an opening reception coinciding with the Arts District of New Orleans’ (ANDO) First Saturday Gallery Openings on Saturday 2 June from 6-9pm.

The artist discusses the new paintings . . .

These are landscapes.

My sense of what landscape is has been evolving, expanding. What began tethered to place is now freer, larger, an all encompassing psychological landscape. Most of us spend more of our time peering into backlit screens, less time in the physical world, and the mediated, the digital, has taken hold in my landscapes, alters the real, dazzles and degrades.

Wallpaper from a childhood bedroom shows up, images lifted from other artists on Instagram, video-game monsters. Disaster photos, shared, liked, validated. Signs reoccur, the most straightforward of signifiers. Text, jumbled, cut off, weaves in and out of the paintings. Abandoned buildings still dominate, a long-held touchstone in my work, but they fight for canvas with a cacophony of other "places".

Glitter augments everything, I'm drawn to the allure of reflected light, an old instinct to pick up what shines. To dazzle is to make dazed, to impair ones vision with an excess of light. The bright screens, the glitter, seem to come from the same space. The memories are altered by recall, a toy shows up here, a place I've seen in person, but the source material is degraded by use, by the clutter of other images.

Still, these are landscapes.

JENNY DAY (b.1981) is a painter who divides her time between Tucson, Arizona and Santa Fe, New Mexico. 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. Her national and international exhibition record most recently includes Arte Laguna in Venice, Italy, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Korea, Phoenix Art Museum, Blue Star Contemporary Museum in San Antonio, TX, Elmhurst Museum in Chicago, IL, Crocker Museum in Sacramento, CA, Florida State University Museum in Tallahassee, FL and Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, in New Orleans, LA. Day's work has been supported by an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2018, a Contemporary Forum Artist Grant from the Phoenix Art Museum in 2017, a Barron Purchase Award in 2016 and through participation at the Ucross Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, Playa Foundation For The Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Art Center, and the Armory Art Center.

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