Fifth Wall: Christina P. Day
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Trained as a textile artist, Christina Day appropriates vintage objects, wallpapers and other everyday, domestic goods and subsequently alters them by manipulating their interior surfaces. Often working with pairs of objects, Day inverts or performs what she terms a “turnaround” by folding a found object onto itself so that it mirrors its own form and function. Surfaces are intricately reworked or covered with decorative patterns or other unexpected materials, further subverting what were once functional objects.
The inspiration for Day’s exhibition came from the term “Fifth Wall,” which was a phrase coined from the wall coverings company Panta Astor. It refers to the transformation of a room by applying wall coverings to the ceiling to create a completely enclosed interior space. In reference to this motif from history, Day presented multiple manipulated objects and a site-specific installation that incorporates the original architecture of the building. All the objects and the installation presented in Fifth Wall are "built off of existing surfaces and structures with the purpose to envelope, entomb and elevate their source materials while redirecting their function.”
Christina Day received a BFA from the University of the Arts and a MFA in Fiber from the Cranbrook Academy of Art (MFA, Fiber ’06). She has been a Resident Artist at Sculpture Space, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Haystack Mountain School of Craft. She is a current member of the
NAPOLEON artist collective and was a participant in the CITYWIDE: A Collective Exhibition project. She teaches as an Adjunct Professor in the Fiber Departments at both The University of the Arts (Philadelphia, PA) and the Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD); and has written articles on her own work and well as reviews of others for Architecture & Ideas and Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture. She lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.
