Artist: Michael DeLucia

Halsey McKay presents Acid Bath, Michael DeLucia’s second solo exhibition, on view in the upstairs gallery. The exhibition features carved aluminum works derived from familiar utilitarian objects — lamps, galvanized steel basins, a gas tank, a milk jug. Encountered constantly in everyday life, these forms often dissolve into abstraction. Like a word repeated until it loses meaning and becomes pure sound, these ordinary objects begin to appear strange.

This shift in awareness raises questions about what constitutes an object. DeLucia addresses this through an analog-to-digital-to-analog process. Objects are exported from physical reality into the abstract domain of virtual space, separating them from their original material identity before projecting them back into the physical world. They register the passage of something unseen and synthesize a new identity in the ambiguity that comes back with them. The results are ghostly apparitions—disturbances in material space akin to shadows, footprints, or crop circles.

Produced from aluminum sheets using CNC machining, the sculptures stage a conflict between organic material and the utopian logic of euclidean form. As digital models are translated into cut paths, the metal resists perfect transcription. These moments foreground the tension between computational ideals and the stubborn physicality of matter.

Michael DeLucia was born in 1978 in Rochester, NY and educated at the Royal College of Art, London and the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. He currently lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions include The Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara; Eleven Rivington, New York; Anthony Meier, San Francisco; Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels; and Luce, Turin. Group exhibitions include Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City; Halsey McKay, East Hampton; Andrea Rosen, Derek Eller, Klaus Von Nischtssagend, and Bureau, New York; Double Take with Public Art Fund at MetroTech Center, Brooklyn; and Linkage at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit.