Artist Bio

Sophia (Phi) Day is an artist from the Chicagoland area who currently works in Boston. She graduated from Vanderbilt University with a B.A. concentrating in oil painting and she graduated with her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. She also received a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Painting & Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently, Day is an artist teacher, teaching at several higher education institutions, such as Northeastern University, while maintaining a personal practice rooted in feminist interpretations of visual culture. In addition to teaching, she is deeply committed to art organizations and artist spaces, having served as the Operations Director at Gallery 263 since 2023. Her practice incorporates academic research, art making, teaching, and curating. So far, her work has been shown in multiple cities such as Nashville, Chicago, and Boston. Recently, she spoke at the annual TED x Tufts conference in spring 2024 with her original talk Monastic Meals to “Girl Dinner”: The Religious History of Diet Culture. Her public art work can be seen around the Boston area, and she is currently working on an upcoming two-person show for fall 2025 that explores the national housing crisis.

Artist Statement

I am an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, printmaking, installation, sculpture, and digital fabrication. My work is rooted in my Italian Catholic upbringing and is a vehicle for both scholarly research and personal reflection. While I still consider Catholicism to be an integral part of my worldview and heritage, throughout the years my relationship with my upbringing has become more nuanced and complex – my work is neither pro nor anti religion but instead acknowledges the immense weight of its visual history as a tool to explore issues today. I take a variety of approaches in my work ranging from the critical to the absurd and the humorous. There is humor in tension and juxtaposition, in subversion and inversion, in revealing banality behind grand constructions and in joining disparate worlds. I try and infuse my work with the same humor that I find when saint candles, tools of veneration and meditation, are stocked next to cans of beans and deodorant under flickering fluorescent lights.

While my body of work has evolved over the years, shifting focuses and approaches, at the core I am interested in bodies and institutions, the visual culture and memories we inherit, and how these forces mutually shape one another. Consumption is a central theme in my work, both literal and metaphorical, investigating how our construction of ourselves is mitigated by what we eat and what we see. My graduate thesis work explored the feminine body as a site of contention in Catholicism and capitalism with a particular emphasis on food, and my emerging body of work builds upon these themes but with an eye towards narrative and cultural constructions. I am currently building a new body of work that examines figures such as catacomb saints, as well as anonymous bodies through the lens of collective memory and nonlinear histories. In every aspect of my work, I search for areas of friction between ancient ideals and current dialogues while also highlighting areas of uncanny alignment. I am invested in dichotomies, in juxtapositions, in the spaces between clashing ideas and the often-humorous dialectical outcomes that emerge, like when folklore and religion amalgamate into idiosyncratic practices. I view my art as a vehicle for my research, if that vehicle was a church mini-van spray painted with my visions of the apocalypse and candy.

I am interested in a variety of visual languages to convey meaning in my work, such as using classical art historical references both in composition and material choices to tie my work to pre-existing dialogues while also incorporating contemporary approaches and technologies to situate my work within current dialogues. Material study and investigation is critical to my practice; I believe that materials have their own bodied knowledge, acting as a vehicle for meaning even if we are not consciously aware of it. Bright pink paint features prominently in my work as an example of this material knowledge and conceptual tie – the ideas I am engaging with are centuries-old and often spiritual, yet we instinctively understand this pigment as being contemporary and artificial, setting up the juxtaposition I am so fascinated by. By utilizing various approaches and materials, I invite the viewer can engage in a multi-sensory experience that reflects the multifaceted nature of the subjects I explore with the end goal of encouraging reflection and further dialogue.