Pushing photography over the edge

An Aspiration to Enfold All

Ted Kincaid opens a new exhibit of his real and manufactured photography with works never shown before in North Texas

DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
taffet@dallasvoice.com

Dallas artist Ted Kincaid’s newest exhibit has been 10 years in the making. “We’re calling it The Wild Unrest,” he explained, “from a line in a Walt Whitman work that’s influenced a lot of my work.”

Liliana Bloch Gallery, where his exhibit opens on March 18, has dubbed the show Not In Another Place, But This Place, also from a Whitman poem.

Whitman influenced Kincaid’s core, the artist said, because he sees homosexuality as an identity rather than as a behavior.

“Queer art needs to be figurative,” Kincaid said. “My art is inseparable from my queer identity.”

Kincaid is known for his manipulated cloud photographs, and pieces from that branch of his work are part of the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts in San Antonio and the Columbus Museum. In 2018, the Georgia Museum of Art held the first solo museum show of Kincaid’s work.

In addition, Toyota, American Airlines, Microsoft and the Perot Foundation are among the corporations that own pieces of Kincaid’s work. So does Resource Center. And the U.S. State Department. And his art was chosen to hang among works welcoming world travelers to Terminal D at DFW Airport.

Twice he has been commissioned to design the cover of Neiman Marcus’ The Book. A two-story Kincaid canvas hangs permanently in Dallas’ Omni Convention Center Hotel.

“My early work revolved around the veracity of the photographic image,” Kincaid said. And he began working on his form of art before programs like Photoshop — which make photo manipulation on computer possible — even existed.
And yet, even though photos are easily manipulated, “we still accept photos in court,” he noted.

But this new exhibit, which has been 10 years in the making, includes a body of his work never exhibited in North Texas. Kincaid said he is excited to be represented by Liliana Bloch Galleries which affords him new freedom of expression. He called the gallery “a dream dealer to be represented by.”

Kincaid described this body of work as having a narrative element to it. “I needed a cast of characters,” he said.
So he began using models, he said. But models pose too much. “Then I worked with friends who understood what I wanted and were much better models,” he said.

He described his process as much more like making a film than just taking photographs. Among his influences, he said, are the painter Thomas Eakins, who painted in the late 1800s and whose work included very controversial — at the time — nudes. Eakins is believed to have used photographs as the basis for his paintings and even to have traced the figures from those photos.

Kincaid described one of his works in this collection about a guy pulling a lifeboat to shore. “Everything is digitally created,” he said. “Lifeboat, etc. The figures are the only photographed image in the work.”

And that’s an important detail to remember in a work by Kincaid, who describes his style as “real and manufactured photography.” Because perception isn’t always reality with his work.

“What you think is real is manufactured, and what you think is manufactured is real,” he said.

Anyone who knows Kincaid must wonder how he has time for his career as an artist. He’s also a full-time teacher and administrator in Plano ISD. For the last 14 years of his long teaching career, he’s not only taught at Plano West but is also the school’s chair of fine arts.

“I have two full-time jobs,” Kincaid said. “I’ve become used to learning how to juggle.”

But at the end of this year, he said, he’s stepping down from his administrative duties to focus more on his own work and place a renewed focus in the classroom.

Not In Another Place, But This Place runs from March 18-May 13 at Liliana Bloch Gallery, 4741 Memphis St. Artist talk on March 18 from 5-6 p.m. Reception for the artist on March 18 from 6-8 p.m.

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To see the full gallery, click here