Forays
Joe Day2021
HALLUCINOGENIC PRECISION
by Neil M. Denari
I'd grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids — and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates.
David Foster Wallace, from Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley
It was the “lines and lines athwart lines” phrase within DFW’s essay on his days playing tennis in Illinois as a youth that lodged itself deeply in my memory, and I’d always wonder when and where I’d refer to it — to use it to explain or confer a reading upon something of great formal or geometric complexity. Now, in Forays, seemed like the perfect time.
Besides the expectorate-like sound, it was the word athwart in particular that struck me as being an altogether different term used to describe a configuration of lines. It made me think instinctively of how architects work, drawing lines over lines, nervously thinking about what they all say or mean but hoping that somewhere in this criss-crossing matrix lies an idea to be excavated. Here, architects can operate either like a chirologist (palm reader), guessing what each line says about a possible future, or as a cryptographer that attempts to precisely decode the value and content of the field, but either way, lines athwart lines dare us to envision a new world.
Athwart: 1) to cross in an especially oblique direction 2) in opposition to.
In Joe Day’s version of this world and in his work with Deegan-Day Design, lines and vectors emerge from the inner workings of visioning machines just as Foster Wallace’s Midwestern grids are redrawn under the forces of nature, which is to say that Day sees his world kaleidoscopically, in geometric patterns that move, distort, and change dynamically in space and time. Through Duchampian filters loaded with the effects of desire and the body and Matta-Clark’s boring out of architectural viscera, Day peers into environments of his own making that fuse accuracy, error, anxiety, and spirituality into a substance that escapes exact material description.
If a scientific experiment depends on a controlled set of conditions and observational techniques and if a drug trip depends on a willingness to have absolutely no control over anything, then in between these two outcomes, I suggest, is a way of seeing on which Joe Day not only depends but has also invented, that is through a lens that distorts as much as it sharpens, indeed, a lens that produces as much mystery as clarity. In this, I’d argue that Day’s C-Glass House fools you into believing its simple bounding box is the entire story, ghost authored by Californian Modernism, while in fact its channel glass envelope is only the most obvious element in the more, shall I say in light of my drug reference above, narcotically driven aspects of the project. A gauzy, dreamlike state surrounds the house, its gridded lines shimmering and wavering before our eyes, its prismatic surfaces playing on our senses.
The trip Day takes us on, guided by all those lines athwart lines, is a type that, thankfully, you never come down from.