Collection: Ted Moore

Ted Moore (b. 1974) is an artist, musician, and educator based in Hesperus, Colorado. He grew up in Washington State, Italy, Maryland, and Colorado, 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, and an M.A. and Ph.D. (ABD) in Medieval Studies from University of Toronto. As a professional drummer he has performed throughout North America in Navy bands and popular music groups. He is currently completing a Masters in Fine Art at the Maine College of Art & Design while also teaching music and performing with a neosoul band.

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.