Ted Moore
Artist Statement
My home in Colorado is a window onto the high desert Southwest, its ecology and its tricultural
history. The physical material and the subject of my art is wood: from piñons to portales, wood
tells the stories of Indigenous, Hispanic, and other European settler cultures of this region, all of
whom have called it home. I work in monochromatic ink on wood panels, gold and copper leaf,
and wood, branches, lichen, and leaves. The echoes of late medieval European art and Spanish
colonial craft sound throughout my monochromatic ink paintings, triptychs, escritorios, and
retablos. A numinous realism pervades my close observation of wood and other natural
materials, juxtaposed against traditional European devotional objects and objects for daily use –
boxes, stools, and drawers. My work literally and figuratively re-frames the familiar into new
landscapes, inviting the viewer to re-envision our physical and cultural relationship to the land.
Grounded in a sense of place and referencing actual mountains, lakes, and groves of trees, my
artwork deconstructs and reconstructs the religious concept of transubstantiation, the moment
when what is physical becomes spiritual, when what is human becomes divine. My intent is to
break down human-centered binaries: fabricated/natural, matter/mind, mundane/transcendent,
finite/infinite. I believe that the deconstruction of such binaries is integral to our future well-being,
and that deconstruction underlies the aesthetic functionality of my work. I seek to reveal a place
in which our entangled everyday and extraordinary beings find common ground.
Artist Bio
Ted Moore (b. 1974) is an artist, musician, and educator based in Hesperus, Colorado. He grew
up in Washington State, Italy, and Maryland, and his career represents the confluence of art and
craft, composition and performance, and languages, literature, and history. He earned his B.A.
in Classics from University of Colorado, Boulder, an M.A. and Ph.D. (ABD) in Medieval Studies
from University of Toronto, and a Masters in Fine Art from Maine College of Art & Design. As a
professional drummer he has performed throughout North America in Navy bands and popular
music groups.
Ted’s artwork is inspired by the landscape, cultures, and history of the Southwest U.S., with a
particular focus on trees and wood. Trees measure the passage of time and seasons of life,
creating ecological and cultural records; Ted’s art addresses layers of history embodied in both
nature and everyday cultural items. His work is characterized by realism, monochromism, and
the co-optation of centuries-old European art and craft forms. He combines photorealistic ink
painting with historical European cabinetry forms such as retablos, triptychs, reliquaries, writing
desks, apothecary cabinets, and cabinets of curiosity, mediating between the known and the
unknown, the mundane and the transcendental. His research as a medievalist informs his ability
to adapt traditional visual vocabulary to a contemporary aesthetic in order to explore an
ecological ontology, a different way of navigating conceptions of what is transcendent, what is
present, and how those two meet. By juxtaposing devotional and organizational objects and
natural objects, he seeks to overturn anthropocentric and dualistic thinking to convey a sense of
interobjectivity. His work allows objects to be traditional as well as ahistorical, products of both
nature and human labor.
