E.V. Day: Divas Ascending

Artist E.V. Day has repurposed costumes from the New York City Opera archives to make Divas Ascending, a series of sculptures that transform familiar icons of women's empowerment and entrapment into new objects that confound conventional readings of these cliches.

Using tension to suspend, stretch, and shred garments and to create forms that the artist likens to futurist abstract paintings in three dimensions, Day has created work that transforms rigid symbols into a range of emotions: anxiety, ecstasy, liberation, and release.

This selection represents eight of the thirteen originally commissioned by New York City Opera.