By Kirstin Ohrt
Department of Art & Archaeology
Evan Haley ’24 with his animation work. Photo by Kirstin Ohrt
Practice of Art senior Evan Haley has convened the three choirs of the highest order of angels, Ophanim, Cherubim, and Seraphim, in Hurley Gallery for his senior exhibition titled Be Not Afraid. Avoiding any representation of God, Haley is more interested in the question: ”What does it mean to be an attendant to the object of worship?” He presents each choir as having an explicit role in service not just to God, but also to beauty, framing the exhibition as “an exaltation of all the aesthetic ideals I believe in.”
“It’s a struggle trying to give form to something that exists as a metaphor,” he said. “That’s why a lot of what you see here is filtered through a personal aesthetic.” He centers his aesthetic on surface treatments and symmetry. The surfaces of the works function as languages that translate potentially threatening forms into beauty. “I think a lot about surface as the primary point of contact both as an artist with the material and the audience visually with the material,” he explained. Heavily reinforcing the theme of symmetry are deer antlers present in several works, a subtext lingering from his initial exhibition idea of exploring the inner world of this creature whom he describes as having “serene conviction.”
To realize his spectacular vision, Haley drew from an extravagant toolbox not limited to 3-D printing, plaster casting, stucco facing, sewing, origami, flocking, carpentry, kiln fusing and flameworking glass, animation, 3-D modeling, generative coding, AI image training, audio mixing, and video production.
The Bible was Haley’s sole reference in establishing the role of each angel choir. The Ophanim, which he says function as the wheels on God’s chariot, are represented in an animated cycle of original and AI-generated renderings that depict abstracted creatures encased in fluid perimeters on a screen. The entirety of technical skill required to create 3-D models, code the fluid motion, and train the AI model Haley learned in the current semester.
Haley sees the Cherubim as God’s bodyguards. Three lavish oversized stilettos on high pedestals topped by a pair of exquisite antlers with a vibrant velvet coating in each of the primary colors represent collapsed versions of ten-foot-tall beings. Haley created these with a combination of 3-D printing and plaster casting, a process he said took 10 rolls of 3-D printing filament for making the molds and 6 hours per casting, unmolding, and finishing each different boot.
“God’s entourage,” as Haley calls them, represents the final choir, the Seraphim. This choir takes up adjacent walls of the gallery, one lined with pedestals displaying costume elements and artifacts, and the other filled by a projected video titled Seraphim. Elements include a custom kimono on a hand-crafted kimono stand, a mask decorated with iridescent cellophane origami flowers that Haley made by the heat of a candle’s flame, a kiln-fused dichroic glass pendant, a flame-worked borosilicate glass sword, and a pair of wearable antlers. As the seven scenes in the video unfold, Haley and Sophia Solganik ’24 develop the Seraphim aesthetic by clothing Haley in all of the Seraphim costume elements displayed in the gallery. The vocal interludes between each scene are Haley’s selected passages on the idea of beauty from authors including Charles Baudelaire, Annie Dillard, Julia Kristeva, Richard Siken, Oscar Wilde, or Haley’s favorite artist, Arca.
Though the exhibition displays an eclectic temporality, Haley draws a through-line from the video projection, whose natural background represents prehistory, moving through the classical portico on which the video scene unfolds, into the gallery with its brutalist pedestal infrastructure, and ending at the animation sequence, in the future.
See Be Not Afraid at Hurley Gallery from May 6-10, 2024.
