| Melissa Day at Peak Gallery
Melissa Day's beautiful exhibition Certain Insecurity is a mystery
wrapped in an enigma and further bound by an aching, haunting
poignancy that is both distressing and ennobling. The exhibition is built around the video work Whistle and Shipwreck,
a split-screen projection. On the left screen, a wrecked sailboat
(named Fat Chance) sits crumpled on the beach, the surf pounding
in all around it, while, on the right screen, a young woman (Day's
sister) whistles a familiar hymn (Great Is Thy Faithfulness).
The juxtaposition of the now derelict boat and the halting, imperfect
whistling --a kind of benediction borne on the wind -- is remarkably
moving. And it gets even more moving to learn that Day, who now lives
in San Francisco, had planned to write the words "Save Me"
in the sand, in the course of walking one morning on California's
Rodeo Beach in the Marin Headlands, only to come upon the wreck
instead. And it was only after her bringing the two sequences
together (the wrecked sailboat and the whistling), that she discovered
a blog on the Internet (now available in the gallery) that outlines,
in painful detail, the circumstances of a tragedy (a 15-year-old
boy on a sea journey with his dad had been swept overboard and
drowned only a few hours before Day's walk on the beach).
The rest of this thoughtful and blessedly unsentimental exhibition
is made up of paintings, or, more accurately, of digital-pigment
prints overpainted with oils, one of which shows the Golden Gate
bridge (almost an incarnation, for Day, of "certain insecurity"),
which Day has almost entirely painted out, leaving only a sort
of visual murmur of its soaring piers and, in the foreground,
of its reflection. Another painting/print, Shipwreck, is also
a large photograph of the doomed Fat Chance lying on its side
but, as with the Golden Gate, almost entirely painted out, so
that only a ghostly mast and a watery reflection on the beach
remain: the image as recollection merely.
about the exhibition |
