Architecture of Joy

Architecture of Joy is the title of a group of Conceptual artworks by Ava Day in which the sculptural framings are as much a part of the piece as the stage and stage-set would be a part of a play or performance. The frame stands as a portal, or invitation to a vision or memory, be it painful, beautiful, or hopeful. She describes her work as fragments of dreams, fantasies, or moments in time.  She describes an interest in the mind’s ability to organize and sublimate the two-dimensional space of the canvas as theater into which the drama of a moment can be pressed.

The artist Ava Day paints the inner vision.  With a feeling for nature, her works seem charged with associations.  She defines her work as Visionary Conceptualism, an intimate, personal art. They are also Metaphysical, in that they relate to the transcendent, to a reality beyond that which is perceptible to the senses, full of an invented symbolism.

Spirituality animates many of the works, images paired down to their most eternal elements, exalting the mysterious, aiming to unify art and the senses.   They evoke memory, the persistence of dreams in the face of reality, dreams that manifest content.  Dreams, truer than other aspects of life, lead to a highly suggestive vagueness.  She describes her paintings as a pictorial arrangement of the psychical under which lies a profound concealed truth.  She creates at times a disquieting melancholic longing, or a sense of foreboding, evoking inner tumult, hidden beneath an eloquent exterior, giving life to simple natural scenes, whether humble or magical.

Ava Day’s work attempts to restore purity and sincerity and often with an irresistible sense of whimsy.    She believes that there is a need for silence; a silence that restores meaning.  An art of quietude, rooted in terrains of silence, causing us to listen to the innerness of our beings, reconciling nature with contemporary life

Her paintings speak of poetry, not because of literary themes or verses, but because they present images with a poet’s eye or ear.  The painting of an idea delving below narrative and even below consciousness, but full of the beauty and terror of life: conversations with the soul, with a wild note of longing.  These themes interweave so that yearning and religion, destiny and eternity, symbol and idea, all become one.