Fathoms of the Leviathan – Ted Lincoln
May 11th – June 17th
Reception Saturday, May 13th 6-10pm
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The Great Highway Gallery is thrilled to present Fathoms of the Leviathan, new works from Ted Lincoln.
About the Artist
Ted Lincoln was born in 1974 in Wearham, MA and currently resides in Gainsville, FL. Ted graduated with a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. This exhibition will include his Sumi ink on rice paper abstract landscapes and his Asian mother-of-pearl inlay lacquer works. Fathoms of the Leviathan is a visual inquiry of the classic American novel, Moby Dick.
Artist Statement
I like to believe I have a grasp of my multi-faceted identity, forged in and through the context of my precise and often complicated time in history, the clashing of cultures that form my ever-changing understanding of the world, and the complex environments within and between which I move. Truthfully, it is more a contingent grouping of vexed notions, often elusive. My art practice has been in pursuit of a visual dialog of ideas, building a sense of who I am, and, specifically, what worlds being hapa spans. I have explored these convergences in two separate bodies of work.
The first has been working with abstract ink painting as an inquiry into the moods of landscape. I have also experimented with nontraditional modern materials to help integrate and therefore transform sumi ink paintings into objects of aluminum and automotive paint.
In the second and more recent body of work, I dive into traditional Asian mother-of-pearl inlay lacquer works, alongside the truly Floridian style of cypress wood folk art that harkens back to the era of my own childhood. Synthesizing these usually disparate media has allowed me to juxtapose seamlessly, both in form and content, my conceptions of millennia-old world mythologies alongside contemporary pop culture in an era of intensifying globalization.
This exhibit will be the first time that both bodies of work, which I’ve previously examined in distinct, parallel worlds, will now be brought together under one theme. Fathoms of the Leviathan is a visual inquiry of the classic American novel, Moby Dick. Moby Dick has loomed large in our collective history, but it also touches my personal history quite directly. Both the book and I originate from a small corner of Massachusetts, and the scene that introduces Ishmael, the narrator of the intricate novel that, like my artwork, unifies previously distinct genres, occurs at a site just a few miles from my own place of birth. The opening of the whaling trade for the first time between New England, the home of my father’s family for generations, and the islands of the Philippines, the home of my mother and her family, may have, in turn, been one of the vast yet subtle tides of history that led to my own creation.
These themes are more than personal, and have resurfaced with renewed energy and perhaps even urgency. The white whale and the rigors of the sea evoke universal ideas of obsession, greed, oceanic power, freedom, danger, global markets and cultural exchange, and all that is entailed in the perennial pursuit of man’s dominance over nature. There seems no better time and place to reconsider how one man’s dire internal conflicts can not only reflect, but also manifest, replicate, and even overwhelm the social and perhaps even natural world around him, leaving few to tell a true, whole tale.
Artist Links
http://www.tedlincoln.com/
http://www.motherofpearlart.com
instagram @tedlincoln
Contact
John Lindsey
info@thegreathighway.com
+1(415) 680-3891
The Great Highway
3649 Lawton St
San Francisco, CA 94122
thegreathighway.com
@thegreathighway
