In Jeremiah Day’s work questions of site and historical memory are explored through fractured narratives, employing photography, speech, and improvisational movement. A hybrid form of realism, Day appropriates historical incidents to serve as allegories and examples that might shed light upon broader philosophical and political questions, working between what Hannah Arendt called the “web of human relationships.”

Shep Steiner has written about Day’s work Maquis: “driven by a powerful metaphysic to penetrate the veil of ideological illusion, Jeremiah Day’s practice (and politics) is haunted by the specters of a golden age: by the figure of Hannah Arendt especially, and the topoi of a public and a republic -Jeffersonian America and Athens; but also by Rene Char, the myths and mythic sites surrounding the French Resistance, the fate of the International Brigades on the eve of fascism in Spain, Franz Kafka, Robert Smithson and more. Maquis is exemplary of his narrative and highly personal style. The story and accompanying slide-show moves relentlessly through veritable forests of figures toward what Benjamin called the ‘wooded interior’ of the symbol. Always so very close, his work seems to lean, ever so gently, on the threshold of unreality that permeates the world, though very often this narrative possibility is taken up by discourse leading him to considerations of power, funding, the institution, and autonomy.”

Jeremiah Day graduated from the art department of the University of California at Los Angeles in 1997 and was a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam from 2003-4. His work has been included in exhibitions as Manifesta 7 and Heartland, a collaboration between the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. His ongoing collaborative work with Simone Forti was recently presented in an exhibition and performance series in Ludlow 38 in New York. In 2010, Jeremiah Day began an experimental collaboration with the Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design (maHKU) and the Free University of Amsterdam, working between the two institutions in structuring a unique Doctorate of the Arts.