Centron
December 7, 2017
Halsey, an artist from Kendallville, Indiana, was as serious in his artistic practice as well as his spiritual life. Exploring religious topics through the realms of academia, Halsey attended Wheaton College in Illinois, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Michigan State University, and a Master of Arts Degree in Church History and Creative Art, and a Ph.D. in Humanities at Florida University.
Since the mid-1980s, Halsey served as an art consultant to design firms, businesses, and hospitals, and helped establish the art program at Spring Arbor University while he was teaching there in the 1970s. Known for his hard edged three-dimensional serigraphs, he explores themes of idealism and divinity in his work. Halsey’s artistic interests are based in Christianity, as he sees his artistic practice as a human attempt at “visualizing an ideal” and looking at cosmic order through mathematics. His pieces often represent the trinity and “emanating light in ordered structures, suspended in deep space.”
Centron is named after a medication made from Ormeloxifene, otherwise known as the birth control pill. The circular print exhibits a composition of squares that speak to traditional science as well as sacred geometry, the practice of ascribing symbolic significance to geometric shapes and proportions. Centron acts as an estrogen receptor, which is tied to Halsey’s thematic scheme of his work through conception. Halsey looks at the spirituality and the calculations that affect human life through the geometric forms in his work.