The Georgia Museum of Art recently acquired four photographic works by Texas-based artist Ted Kincaid for its permanent collection. This acquisition follows Kincaid’s solo exhibition at the museum in the winter of 2018-19.
Over the course of two decades, Ted Kincaid has explored the connection between photography and painting, merging the objective image with constructed reality. Using digital prowess to reconstruct the factuality of the photograph, Kincaid continues to create images in which painting and photography are informed by one another. This is true for the four newly acquired pieces from Kincaid’s series “Not For Another Hour, But This Hour.”
“Not For Another Hour, But This Hour” evokes nautical exploration from another era to subvert the division between a photograph’s veracity and the invented reality of a painting or digitally-created image. “These four works represent, to me, a perfect synthesis of factual and manufactured information,” says Kincaid. While the laboring figures featured in the works are photographed, all other elements are created digitally. The resulting pictures bare the aesthetic of straightforward photographs yet possess vibrant palettes and depict scenes suggestive of the imaginary.
The rocky and nebulous shores of the images draw inspiration from the literary backdrops of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman and elements of Romantic paintings. Indeed, much of Kincaid’s work relates to the Romantic ideal of the sublime, merging reality with imagination through the lens of personal experience and memory.
Memory plays a central role in Kincaid’s painting-photography discourse. He relates the shifting nature of memories to the construct of digital painting. “As we progress further from our experience, an increasing amount of our memory tends to be supplanted by our mental construct of that memory,” says Kincaid. “In a certain passage of time, our recollection of an event becomes fabricated.” Just as cognitive fragments piece together narrative memories, digitally-created elements reinterpret the reality of a photograph.
Museum director William U. Eiland sees this subjectivity as a valuable way for viewers to individually connect with the pieces. Each image becomes “an event for each viewer,” Eiland says, “who through careful looking, is able to interpret or elaborate on the narrative through his or her experience.”
Eiland admits that the museum has been too slow in adding to its collection of photographic works, and that Kincaid’s pieces are a valuable addition from a master contemporary artist. “We are pleased that Kincaid’s complex, oft joyful, works join others new to our collections,” he says.
Ted Kincaid’s unique conceptual vision has earned him recognition across the country. He has been reviewed in Artforum, Artpaper and Art on Paper and is included in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts in San Antonio, the Neiman Marcus Collection, American Airlines, the Belo Corporation, the Microsoft Corporation, Pfizer, Inc, Reader’s Digest Corporate Collection, the City of Seattle, Washington, the U.S. State Department and the Human Rights Campaign Headquarters in Washington, DC.
Authored by:
Hana Rehman
