Richard Haley: Rehearsals

Rehearsals is a solo exhibition by Detroit-based artist, Richard Haley. Haley’s works investigate the use of surrogates in performance as he documents staged events being performed by inanimate proxies. The surrogates function in a number of ways: as literal casts of Haley’s body parts; as digital 3D renderings; and as traces of the body, such as the impression one would leave behind if lying down in the grass or residue left behind from the ashes of Haley’s cremated body. A number of works employ hand crafted miniature sculptures of everyday objects to be used as stand-ins for the original.  Haley is interested in treating the body as raw material, and with consideration of the body as an apparatus. His stand-ins create attentiveness to the materials they are being made from, and point to the authentic corpus it references. Rehearsals serves to shift the work outside the vernacular of performance and documentation and steer it towards the presence and presentness of sculpture. By using screen-based technology, Haley forces a collision between the hyperreal/unreal virtual world and the tangible physical lived experience, calling into question the ephemeral weightless matter of digital images and their heavy influence on daily lives.
This exhibition is one of 4 shows being held in celebration of the partnership between Verge Center for the Arts and the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, opening November 13th. Verge, in collaboration with Lisa Rybovich Crallé, is curating the festivities for the grand opening weekend of the Manetti Shrem. For more information, please visit manettishrem.org.