Heather Day: Split Screen

September 17 - October 15, 2022

The Pit Los Angeles, CA

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The Pit is pleased to present Split Screen, Joshua Tree-based artist Heather Day’s first solo show with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view at the gallery’s newly renovated Los Angeles location from September 17 to October 15, 2022 with an opening reception on September 17 from 5-7PM. 

Split Screen is a reference to the way our fragmented experience of the world affects perception and memory. The immediacy and abundance of information we come up against everyday presents many parallel paths of reality. Personal memory and individual perspectives are often distorted by the natural fallibility of emotional attachment to a place, event, or moment in time. This body of work reflects that fractured mosaic through an idiosyncratic process of doing, undoing, copying, and reorganizing. The physical process of Day’s work relies on muscle memory and the inclinations or practiced gestures that are held within the body. All the paintings in this series begin with the same compositional form that finds new life in each iteration through the limitations of the physical self and irregular environmental factors – a method of painting that embraces chance interactions and the way a mark evolves as the artist attempts to replicate it. 

After mapping out the composition the artist begins by pooling swirls of pigment onto the canvas in a measured manner that seeks to recreate the past action used to create the painting before it. Day does this with the expressed knowledge that external forces will take over. Gravity, the time of day, or memory’s lack of precision are the chaos that challenge her meticulous restagings and create atmospheric shifts in color and movement. The formal starting point of each new work is a unique combination of pigment which blooms and echoes the form of the painting before it. To underscore this lack of control, she cuts up her painted canvases and then stitches them back together to find something new has formed between the contoured layers. The negative spaces that break up the washes of paint offer moments of respite to reflect on these unpredictable occurrences. On top of these stitched compositions, the artist activates the surface with exacting gestural marks that form etchings reminiscent of a map or musical notes. By reproducing a marking, or dissecting and binding nebulous forms into slotted bays, the artist mines human error and the opposing forces of control and chaos.

Rooted in the traditions of abstract expressionism, Day’s paintings reflect a growing universe where language and communication are less concrete. Personal symbols, jotted down like errant notes, or emotive slurries of color synthesized from the natural world around the artist, create a visual language for the viewer to decipher.

For further information, please contact the gallery at info@the-pit.la.