Jenny Day
»half light«

Jenny Day (b. 1981), lives and works as a painter and sculptor in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  She earned an MFA in painting 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 recent exhibitions include Arte Laguna in Venice, Italy, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Korea, Museum of Art Fort Collins, Mesa Arts Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, Blue Star Contemporary Museum in San Antonio, TX, and Elmhurst Museum in Chicago, IL. Day’s work has been supported by an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, a Puffin Foundation Grant, a Phoenix Art Museum Contemporary Forum Artist Grant, a Barron Purchase Award, and participation in Greenwich House Pottery, the Ucross Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, and the Playa Foundation For The Arts, among others.

It is rare to find artists who have studied another subject in addition to painting. Jenny Day is one of those exceptions, and it is unmistakable that her preoccupation with environmental studies has left a distinct mark on her thinking and painting. Her paintings show us nature, but not as we know it from landscape painting, but she creates a world all her own. In your early works, she has worked a lot with collages, this technique is still recognizable in your acrylic works. Through your technique, Jenny Day manages to structure the picture levels and so arise in addition to smooth almost monochrome surfaces, many gestural elements that occur especially in the painterly examination of the animals. Also recourse to approaches of Surrealism are unmistakable. Mostly animals are the main motifs, these are friendly creatures, and facing and yet in a strange way in fear and on the run. The peaceful animals as a symbol of the still existing original nature in a world that is anything but holy, where behind the facades already lurks the apocalypse. Also in them ceramic works she arranges with her own handwriting figures and forms, which she takes directly from your immediate environment and so devours as if nature and creature have no more air to breathe. Jenny Day has found her very own and distinctive way and style to deal with the issues of our time, impressive, exciting, but never super-teachy and with great painterly power.

She lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA).