Twenty-two images line the wall of Marty Walker Gallery, foggy, silvery alien landscapes: an iceberg adrift in the sea, craggy mountain ranges, the glowing surface of the moon. Ted Kincaid’s new work breaks from the wistful austerity of artist’s pristine cloudscapes with images that are grittier, dreamier. That the work in Every Doubt that Holds You Here looks like the mid-19^th century photographs of Gustave Le Gray or early films like Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902) is every bit the point. This is an homage, of sorts, to photography and photographic process, made, we are told, without the use of any “photographic material.”

That revelation contains Kincaid’s conceptual kick, placing this works somewhere in the same theoretical realm as the work of another Marty Walker artist, Jeff Zilm, who emulsifies photographic medium to create monochromatic, suggestive canvases. Think of Kincaid as the inverse of that conceptual project, using non-photographic material to create immersive, decidedly unreal scenes which punch with the power of illusion and conjure up a palpable sense of removed-ness.

Image: Iceberg 616 2010,Digital Photograph printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Pearl 320 gsm

12×16”