“I still consider myself a painter, but now I use light instead of pigment to make the real unreal.”

 

 – Ted Victoria

 

 

Ted Victoria comprises light projections and mixed media works, each employing the camera obscura.

 

Rejecting the high-tech digital formats that have become commonplace in contemporary art, Ted Victoria’s work uses lenses and mirrors to create images that challenge the viewer’s perception. The images have a diorama-like quality and create a sense of real space and movement within the confinements of a box. The images are, in fact, reflections of objects projected onto glass. The objects are thoughtfully incorporated into a work based on their functionality and reflective qualities.

 

Victoria expands his process further by projecting the reflection of the resulting mirrored images of the incased objects onto the gallery wall. By magnifying the common, seemingly mundane objects, viewers discover details that may otherwise be overlooked by the naked eye. Krill  (2009), one of the two projections on view, augments the appearance of brine shrimp (commonly known as sea monkeys). Once magnified, these miniature crustaceans appear alien-like, swarming within a glass habitat. The second projection places incandescent and tungsten filament light bulbs side by side. The work’s title Male and Female (2012) reinforces the figurative nature of these objects as they share a place on the wall – closely but never touching.

 

Ted Victoria (b. 1944) received a M.F.A. from Rutgers University in 1970. His work is represented in the collections of Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, France; Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Forbes Collection, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Tasa Collection, Munich; and many others.

 

Ted Victoria ran concurrently with two exhibitions: Robert Mapplethorpe and George Platt Lynes.