Sculptor Evan Morse uses ancient, timeless styles to comment on—and poke fun at—contemporary society
Originally published in the Fall 2021 issue of CFA magazine. By Andrew Thurston | Images courtesy of Evan Morse
EXCERPT
When ancient Greeks or Romans worked out, they didn’t hit the showers to freshen up; instead, they grabbed a strigil—a long, curved blade—and scraped off the dirt and sweat.
The habit was so widespread it inspired a host of votive sculptures, Apoxyomenos, the Scraper. Each statue showed a naked male athlete—rippled muscles and distant gaze—scouring the film from his skin. The most famous was carved by Lysippos in the fourth century BCE.
In his 2020 take on the Scraper, award-winning sculptor Evan Morse, whose work puts a modern twist on classical art, replaced the strigil with a more contemporary tool: stick deodorant.
Athlete with Deodorant, 2020, painted polychrome plaster, 39 x 14 x 16 in., is a modern twist on classical Greek sculpture.
The painted polychrome plaster Athlete with Deodorant shows a nude male in the timeless pose of Apoxyomenos—but with a blue towel tossed behind him and a bright red Old Spice Original in hand. The statue was modeled on a friend who qualified for the US Olympic marathon trials.
“In a lot of my work, I’m thinking about how humans are inherently the same as we have been across time—just little aspects of our culture have changed,” says Morse (’15).
Athlete with Deodorant is part of Morse’s Idols series, which also includes a relief of a nude woman walking a robot dog, a statue of a man wearing a cow-patterned onesie, a bust flossing its teeth, and a marble icon stuffing a burrito in his mouth. Morse works mostly in clay, plaster, and stone, using ancient styles and techniques to highlight present-day themes. Based in Newton, Mass., he also sculpts—in nonpandemic times, at least—in studios in Carrara, Italy, and West Rutland, Vt.
“There’s usually a little humor in my work,” says Morse. “It’s important for me to have fun. But as I’ve been doing more political work—and it’s hard not to be more political at this stage—it’s hard to balance that out, because some of it can be so negative.”
On one side of 2020’s Sacrificial Altar for Plastic Water Bottles, a relief shows a woman filling a bottle at a public spring: her jeans and sneakers set in contrast to the antique goddess figure perched on the fountain’s plinth. The 19-inch-high piece, made from terra-cotta, was inspired by a water fountain Morse saw in Lucca, Italy, and the empty bottles littering his neighborhood and the politics of clean drinking water.
“I was thinking about offerings to the gods and the marks we leave, our legacy,” says Morse. The altar is part of a series incorporating found objects that includes reliquaries for dog fur, food packages, even toenail clippers. “I’m also making the sculpture more of a functional object than just a purely aesthetic thing.”
Morse and his wife, Taylor Apostol (’15)—also a sculptor—recently launched Goathouse Studio, a website and business to promote their commissioned work: their latest is a marble portrait bust of author and poet Julia C. R. Dorr for Rutland, Vt. But practicality doesn’t always top his agenda.
“I’m not thinking, ‘What’s the work I can make that’s going to sell?’” says Morse, whose art is largely supported by grants. “I’m thinking about the best work I can make.”
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