Rocky Hayden — CalArts Post Grad Show Y25

Rocky Hayden

(Art MFA 25)
https://www.rockyhayden.com/

Five Drawings: Untitled (Orbit); Shooting Star (Internal); Untitled (Spiral) (Upright); The Line; Full Moon, 2024 – 2025

Rocky Hayden’s drawings emerge from a practice situated in present moments, or “spots,” where chance operations meet deliberate gestures on paper marked with tea, ash, milk, and pen. The materials surrounding the artist become the work: tea drunk, smoke inhaled, paper used as surface for gestural spills. These drawings map the elliptical flow of forces in nature, mirroring both the turn-by-turn rhythm of a no-limit Texas Hold’em poker tournament and the orbital motion of Earth around the sun. The intimate scale of mark-making is linked to the cosmic scale of orbital motion. The outcome of risk calculated in real time — yet another emergent system — means players experience exponential growth and entropic loss. Hayden plays with layering systems with divergent logics, so each work reflects the human condition in real time — the interplay of luck and control, freedom and restraint, instinct and analysis that characterizes our participation in an ever-expanding universe.

PROXY CHIMERA ORACLE

CalArts 2025