E.V. Day arrived like a wrecking ball in the late 1990s, leaving suspended sculptural explosions in her wake. The New York-based artist first captured the art world’s attention with the aptly named “Exploding Couture,” 1999-2002, a series of installations featuring tattered women’s garments suspended in the air with monofilament. In the decades since, she’s used thongs, bridal gowns, opera costumes, and fishnet stockings to continue excavating themes of femininity and power.
This month, the dust will settle somewhat in the artist’s eruptive practice. Day will present a series of works—this time in only two dimensions—in a solo show at Aspen’s Baldwin Gallery called “Velocity Drawings and My Crazy Sunshine.” “This show is different,” Day says over Zoom from her New York studio, wearing a black and red Judas Priest T-shirt matching the heart tattoo on her right wrist. "I’ve never done a show that was all two-dimensional work.”
The 21 works on view, created mostly over the last year, grew from the artist’s work on Daytona Vortex, 2020, a sculpture commissioned by racecar driver Jimmie Johnson that she presented at Charlotte’s Mint Museum in 2021. Day designed the piece using design software, and the images stayed with her long after the commission was complete.
Eventually, the artist began iterating on the sculptural mockups, translating 3-D digital models into analog works using oil paint, acrylic paint, watercolor, pens, and colored pencils. Day calls this “editing”—adding material to remove distractions.
The show takes its title from one composition Day found herself returning to again and again, My Crazy Sunshine. “To me, it harkens to Italian Futurism,” says Day of the work’s aerodynamic feel. The Italian Futurists have always been Day’s personal art historical idols. “I was like, 'Why am I returning to something from 100 years ago now?' I realized it’s because the Futurists were celebrating the invention of machines—trains, planes, and automobiles—and this new relationship to speed. That’s exactly what’s happening now. We’re in acceleration mode.”
This isn’t the first time Day has mined art history in her practice. Take Golden Rays / In Vitro, her 2017 installation that will appear in a group exhibition dedicated to the study of light at Los Angeles’s Getty Center this September. Originally staged in the Eternal City—where the artist received the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome—the work reimagines Baroque painting techniques through a decidedly contemporary lens.
In place of the golden lines that the era’s painters employed to represent heavenly light, Day used gilded cords to evoke fiber optic cables, one of the most prized substances of our era. “What is the most valuable thing today?” Day asks. “It’s communication. The Internet."
Back in Aspen, the artist’s latest homage to the connection between modern and analog has left her feeling contented. “I’m happy that I can continue to express these ideas that have been so central to me,” she says, “But in a new way.”
"Velocity Drawings and My Crazy Sunshine" will be on view from July 26 through September 2, 2024 at Baldwin Gallery in Aspen.
