Aircraft cable, gold leaf, monofilament and hardware.
Outdoor/Indoor installation 40ft and variable
Lumen: The Art and Science of Light, 2024, Getty Center, Los Angeles, USA
Cinque Mostre 2017: VISION(S), American Academy in Rome, Italy
Excerpt from Glenn Phillips, Curator and Head of Modern & Contemporary Collections at the Getty Research Institute, catalog text for Lumen: The Art and Science of Light 800-1600 (2024) -
"In Christianity, the Annunciation marks the biblical story when the angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary and announced that she would bear the son of God. It is one of the most commonly-depicted scenes in Western Christian art. Medieval and early Renaissance artists developed a number of visual approaches to representing this encounter, among them the use of golden rays of light to the signify the immaterial presence of the Holy Spirit, which would be passed on to Mary through the conception of Jesus Christ. So common, in fact, are the use of golden rays in art that it hardly seems strange to see that a painting which otherwise employs the most advanced techniques of realism might also have as one of its central motifs a geometric line illustration that would be more at home in a treatise on geometry, astronomy, or linear perspective (see plates 32, 35-41). Yet these are also the moments that show us the degree to which Medieval and Renaissance artists might be well-versed in scientific ideas, as it could be impossible to participate in the development and mastery of perspective without studying mathematics, light, and vision.
E.V. Day’s Golden Rays/In Vitro uses gilded aircraft cable, precisely stretched and anchored, to dramatically transpose the golden rays of Christian art history back into the three-dimensional world. Day playfully notes a degree of continuity between the religious visual motif of the golden rays and Atomic-era sci-fi imagery of laser beams, ray guns, and X-ray vision superpowers. Likewise, the notion of the golden rays as a representation of divine communication from the heavens feels resonant with our current world of satellite communication, fiber optics, and the invisible presence of electromagnetic communication all around us. Was the Immaculate Conception the original high-speed wireless download?
Golden Rays/In Vitro was first presented at the American Academy in Rome, where Day was artist in residence in 2017-18. For that presentation, the rays originated at the skylight of Day’s studio and appeared to pass through a large glass window before terminating in the ground outside the building. Day was responding to a common motif in Annunciation paintings, in which the rays pass through a perfectly-placed window, as if the building in which Mary is situated had been designed with this divine encounter in mind. The glass window led to an additional association for Day: in vitro fertilization. Perhaps our closest equivalent to immaculate conception, this process allows for fertilization to take place outside the human body, in a glass petri dish."
Press Release from The American Academy in Rome -
Cinque Mostre 2017 is an annual exhibition of work by current Rome Prize Fellows. Composed of collaborative projects guest-curated by Ilaria Gianni under the collective title VISION(S), Cinque Mostre features work by Fellows in several disciplines and invited artists installed in various sites throughout the McKim, Mead & White Building. Taking its cue from the multifaceted term “Vision,” and emphasizing its physical-perceptive, political, supernatural, and mystical aspects, VISION(S) explores the strategies that artists and scholars employ to re-configure our perception of the world. This group exhibition brings together different approaches and ways of seeing, which draw their inspiration from the present, facts from the past, and forecasts of the future.
Artist's Statement -
In baroque painting and sculpture, the raggi — or rays of gold pigment that radiate from the Virgin Mary in representations of The Annunciation — herald the presence of the Holy Spirit, transferring power from the heavens to an earthly human. Mary not only conceives a child through these golden beams but is transformed into sainthood through their supernatural essence. The rays of In Vitro that descend from the skylight of Studio 127 and pass through its north-facing window are a terrestrial, contemporary meditation upon power that cannot be described in the form of tangible space. They call to mind electromagnetic waves of radio signals, internet and fiber-optic cables that carry information — breaking news, stock-tickers, gossip — that gives knowledge and power to the recipient. As these golden lines penetrate through the glass barrier of the studio wall, they further reference a contemporary technological analog to the virgin birth — the method of fertilization in which a child is conceived outside a human body, in glass.