Tristin Lowe

Awesome Whale at Williams

It's so lifelike, you have to touch it. More than 52-feet long and 10-feet high, Tristin Lowe's ghostly (ghastly) white sperm whale installation, Mocha Dick has the look and feel of an awesome creature of the sea. Made out of industrial wool that mimics whale flesh with its gashes, harpoon scars, and wooly barnacles, Lowe's work is a marvel of ingenuity. Like its namesake, the elusive albino sperm whale that attacked the Pequod and whacked off Captain Ahab's leg, this is a whale that is exhausted from evading deadly harpooners. Mocha Dick is based on an 1839 report that a sperm whale "as white as wool" deliberately attacked a whaling vessel near Mocha Island, off the coast of Chile. That story was the basis for the Herman Melville 1851 novel, Moby-Dick.

Tags: fabric whale, installation art, Tristin Lowe, whale, Williams College Museum of Art