C-lective Curator’s Cut:

In Spirit of the Deep, Evan Hobart continues his exploration of industry as both body and force, scaling down the form into a more intimate but no less charged sculptural encounter. A powerful ceramic arm and claw extends through the composition, its grip enclosing a small boat as if suspended between capture and submersion. The surface carries Hobart’s signature language of embedded architecture and industrial remnants, yet here it shifts into an oceanic register, where extraction and navigation collapse into one another. The blown glass nails become literally illuminate this work’s meaning, each one containing embedded skulls that only reveal themselves under black light; this transforms the work into something spectral and submerged, as if memory and consequence are held just beneath the surface. The result is a tension between fragility and dominance, where sea, machine, and myth converge into a single gesture of grasping force. In holding the vessel so tightly, the work becomes a meditation on control and vulnerability, suggesting the ocean not as backdrop, but as an active space of consequence, memory, and quiet resistance.