The Voyage, or Three Years at Sea

Artists: Marcus Coates, Beau Dick, Angus Ferguson, Glenn Kaino, Sean Lynch, Susan Philipsz, Duke Riley.

The Voyage, or Three Years at Sea Part VI is the final chapter in an exhibition series that explores our relationship to the sea. In Part VI, we explore sea lore—pirates, sea monsters, lost islands, lost souls—the stuff of legends and tales that have ignited imaginations for centuries and are at the heart of some of the world’s great literature from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. As with the previous iterations in the Voyage series, Part VI brings together the work of local and international contemporary artists with archival materials that form linkages with the rich depths of maritime history.

Los Angeles-based artist Glenn Kaino has produced a body of work based on the Turkish pirate and cartographer, Piri Reis, who during the first part of the sixteenth century created detailed maps and charts, including some of the earliest of the Americas. These maps began as abstract drawings from Piri’s early days as a pirate. Kaino’s large sculptural work A Plank for Every Pirate (2012) is also included in the exhibition. Bristling with planks (the stuff of every pirate story), painted white and suspended in midair, Kaino’s ship is a ghostly spectre of revolutionary possibility.

In his work titled, A preliminary sketch for the reappearance of HyBrazil (2007–2009), Irish artist Sean Lynch reconsiders the legend of an island that for centuries was thought to have existed off the coast of Ireland. HyBrazil first appeared on charts by Italian cartographer Angelino Dulcert in the fourteenth century and it remained on maps for over five hundred years. For his project, Lynch positioned a camera overlooking the Atlantic facing toward the charted location of the mythical island and at sunset each evening took photographs when light and shadow suggested a mirage, or potential presence of a land mass.

For More Information