By fusing narrative modes including poetry, film, music, and collage, Ellen Gallagher recalibrates the tensions between reality and fantasy. She has found inspiration in age-old oceanic myths and stories, including Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, about two elusive mammoths (one a very real whale and the other a very figurative truth). In 2016, Gallagher created the lithograph Lips Sink, depicting the story’s famous surviving artifact, Queequeg’s enigmatically carved coffin.