NEEDS MORE WONDER

Retreating from the stress and chaos of the last year, I created another landscape; populated by an army of friendly creatures.  Here the burdens of coronavirus, climate change, and political division are dismissed by hot pink kittens that arc gracefully through meteor showers and owls that bury into beds of daffodils. In this place worry is edged out by the fantastic and mystical snails trail neon candy canes through the scorched earth. The apocalyptic is supplanted by the surreal and the allegorical.

Anxiety followed me. The escapist reflects and distorts its shadow world, the real, a funhouse mirror that names the traumas as it blows past them, slyly referential. The work suggests that magic is possible; while anchoring itself in the grotesque, inedible foods, a conglomeration of garbage.  A blissful, almost psychedelic, reverence for nature exists, but  the fantasy’s origins leach through in the details and distortions. The animals are often translucent, reflective.  Nature persists, proliferates, and transforms. Relentless flowers push up against the edges of paintings, attempting to smother and subsume, animals and people oblivious to any threat; the threat always present.

Jenny Day (b.1981) is a painter and sculptor who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She holds 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 exhibition record most recently includes 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 Contemporary Forum Artist Grant from the Phoenix Art Museum, a Barron Purchase Award and through participation at Greenwich House Pottery, the Ucross Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, and the Playa Foundation For The Arts, among others. Jenny Day is represented by Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana, and William Havu Gallery in Denver, Colorado.