‘Echoes in Motion’

Two-person exhibition with Patrick Alston at Library Street Collective, Detroit, 2024

Excerpt taken from Library Street Collective’s press release:

”Library Street Collective is pleased to present Echoes in Motion, an exhibition with Patrick Alston and Heather Day, opening on October 26, 2024. Echoes in Motion will be the first presentation dedicated to the two artists, and will showcase eight new paintings informed by the nuances of the natural world.

Alston’s mixed media paintings, characterized by layers of texture built up through gestural marks, investigate themes of identity, process, environment and color theory. Day’s works are similarly bold in their rich and varied hues, reflecting phenomenological experiences within her surrounding landscape. The abstract paintings presented in Echoes in Motion are exceedingly affected by the emotional and sensory impressions of the artists’ transitory environments—Alston’s studio based in Connecticut and Day’s in the Mojave Desert. The suburban area of New Haven County, where Alston moved in 2020 from the Bronx, offers a diverse landscape of wooded mountains, dense forests, and serene bodies of water that continuously shift according to the seasons. The California desert town of Joshua Tree where Day has lived since 2019, on the other hand, presents an arid expanse of sandy plains, rocky outcrops and desert flora, with a remoteness that yields otherworldly light patterns in the sky. “Sensory perception and memory plays a huge role in my work, taking in my environment and all of its textures and sounds and smells.” Day explains. “It’s not always necessarily how it looks, but it's also how it feels.” This sentiment holds true for Alston as well. Despite the differences between the artists’ bicoastal environments, the pair find that their similarities—the seclusion, the solitude, and the liberation that these elements provide both physically and mentally when it comes to creating—are the most prominent influences on their work.”