Painting Cathedral Rock, is a meditative experimental work in which painting, performance, and film converge to explore landscape, ritual, colonialism, and the fragile boundaries between spectacle, spirituality, and perception.

Filmed at the Gretchen Warren Interfaith Chapel in Sedona, Arizona—centered on the revered vista of Cathedral Rock, a sacred Indigenous site and popular “vortex” destination—the piece unfolds in two acts. In the first, the artist meticulously washes and cleans the chapel altar window, gradually revealing the iconic landscape beyond. The second act sees the artist painting the window with a blend of red earth sourced from the surrounding terrain, simultaneously concealing and unveiling the landscape, and dimming the chapel’s interior light. This ritualistic gesture invites viewers to contemplate the duality of sight and the act of looking, while evoking themes of erasure and revelation.

Originally conceived as a three-part performance—washing, painting, and cleansing—the work evolved over nearly a decade. The piece was ultimately distilled into a two-part, single-channel video, reflecting on the complexities of viewing, responsibility, and the coded histories embedded within the act of looking. “The third section, a cleansing, felt wrong—too redemptive, too easy,” Day notes. “Returning to it in 2025, I understood that the unresolved middle was the work: what we are entitled to look at, what we are responsible to in our looking, what is already encoded there—white supremacy, colonialism, erasure, unsettled histories, precarious lands. My own spiritual ‘unknowing’ had opened, slowly, into a reckoning with other kinds of unknowing.”