Unraveled

Unraveled

In Unraveled, Day is investigating how the mechanisms of the mind, and the cultures that people belong to, influence and distort perceptions of self and reality. The mind does this through inaccurate and manipulatable memory, while cultures exert influence through indoctrination and social constructs. Day is investigating this process in general, but through the lens of her own experience, using photographs she takes of places she knows. These pieces aren’t autobiographic, but similarly to how Virginia Woolf and Jane Austin write, Day is using a form of free indirect discourse, where her thoughts and memories are merged with the stories of friends, family, and characters from fiction novels. 

Through material treatment and overall compositions, Day forges a relationship between architectural spaces, identity formation, and female experience. The tapestries are fragmented, sewn together similarly to how different memories are pieced together in the mind to craft self-identity and perceived reality.  A deteriorating aesthetic accentuates the instability of this process and speaks to the simultaneous state of construction and deconstruction that these images exist in. As the initial photograph is deconstructed, Day can be seen to deconstruct the constructs that exist within it.  

The architectural spaces were selected with consideration to the dream theories of Carl Jung, where rooms in a dream home represent different aspects of personality.  Additionally, this choice was influenced by the texts of Gaston Bachelard, and Robert Smithson, whose writings discuss the influence that cultures have on architectural spaces, as well as how spaces can affect the psyches of the individuals who interact with them. Finally considering texts written by Roxanne Gay and Judith Butler, Day is considering gender role performance and projected identities. She is connecting these to architecture through the idea that staging a home is similar to staging an outward identity. 

Through these works, Day is striving to familiarize the viewer with the fragmented structure of perception, identity, and perceived reality, and encourage considerations into the influence constructs, indoctrinated ideas, and past experiences have on their own lives and self-narratives.