Christina Day

Philadelphia, PA
Residency: January-February 2008

Project Description
My sculpture work is an ongoing attempt to refocus attention to the quiet way architecture in a domestic space becomes a repository for poetics and personal history. At Sculpture Space I built three sculptures that are dimensional reflections of place. The first, Return, is a freestanding outline of a room made entirely of trim work.Traditionally the final architectural element installed in a room to cover unintended gaps between wall and floor or wall and ceiling, trim is a decorative cover-up and in this case, the only suggestion of a particular space in a home. All junctures resolve in the way they would if they were mounted over a wall, flush at their backsides to suggest the edges of a painted interior space.

Wall to wall, is a constructed fraction of a staircase. Highly edited in its form and leaning back in its stance, it is a suggestion of an intermediate stair in a line up of others. Its furnishings and coverings end at the edges of where the next sections begin, creating exposed “jog lines” of interlocking form. The angle is tilted in a way to visually suggest both climbing and descending, built from the perspective of use rather than true function. It is an isolated pathway suggesting a spot that is neither here nor there, but rather in between, waiting to absorb the rest of the picture.

There now is a small sculpture of found broken bricks that have been re-laid in mortar and outlined on one edge with a fraction of a doorframe. Mounted to the bricks is a dated orange glowing doorbell fixture that remains lit at all times. Composed literally of found bricks that have already broken on their own accord, this is a piece about a brief reconstruction of place- an artifact about a spot that is never stood in for long but a place one waits for something to happen.

Alongside the sculptural work that I made, I’ve also written a series of “snapshots” that are based on particular moments in time when I observed local people going about their business in the middle of the day. I often write to continue my thoughts past where a simple photograph will end. I am interested in the intermediate moments where people are not necessarily trying to do anything in particular but rather are in the midst of getting other things done.

The time I’ve had here at Sculpture Space has given me the chance to more closely explore the relationship my writing has to my work, allowing me to consider more freely the poetics that drive what my work can be about. The panorama of what is not present is activated in a different way now, my work the vantage point from which to view the vista. This time has helped me widen my vocabulary of materials and effects to more closely evoke a more specific physical snapshot of place.

Artist Statement
The personal history and poetic meanderings of the domestic sphere guide my sculptural work- to create freestanding reflections of dimensional place.

About Christina Day
Christina Day currently lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where she teaches undergraduates and high school students part time at the University of the Arts for both the Crafts/Fibers program and the Pre-College Saturday School. She also works also on architectural preservation projects as a trim carpenter for the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia on historically deemed properties all over the city. She earned her BFA in Crafts/Fiber at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA in 1999 and her MFA in Fiber at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in 2006. She has shown her photographic and sculptural work both nationally and internationally.