Now Hanging: Tony de los Reyes @ Howard House

If you're going after the great white whale, so to speak, it might as well be Moby-Dick. Melville's world of mid 19th-century whaling is the direct inspiration for the works collected in "The Prophet," by Los Angeles artist de los Reyes. His oil-on-linen paintings are dark and tarnished, with the patina of pennies dug up from the ground. His oval-shaped port scene 1857 has white cracks painted on the surface--like a broken Daguerreotype plate. Elsewhere, ships sail upside down on the horizon, and the American flag is reversed and superimposed on the unquiet waves. A ghostly George Washington hangs on another wall, like some historical smudge.

Image and details after the jump...

The show's centerpiece is the large cast-metal wave-table The Prophet--more turbulent seas, with inverted skulls floating amid the chop. It's a kind of maritime horror scene, like the sinking of the Pequod. Is the sea giving up its dead? Or is it pulling the living below?

Howard House, 604 Second Ave., 256-6399, howardhouse.net. Free, Tuesdays-Saturdays, 10:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Through Oct. 31.