NEW YORK—Manhattan-based painter David Hochbaum’s intricately detailed “photo-constructions” referencing mythology, love, confusion, and magic swallow the viewer into a vortex of sirens, symbols, fantastical cities, and the high seas. A trip to his East Village studio is equally disorienting, with hundreds of relics from his artworks haunting the space—a hodgepodge of painted ladders, wooden cages, and dusty model ships of every size.

Between arriving home from his first Los Angeles solo exhibition at Corey Helford Gallery and leaving for Bridge Art Fair in London (where his work was shown at the booth of his Berlin-based gallery, Strychnin), Hochbaum took the time to tell ARTINFO how he got started collecting ships eight years ago.

“I sort of got obsessed with doing these portraits of siren characters,” he said. “It came from the Greek myth of Leucothea. She was chased into the sea with her son in her arms, and she was rescued by the Tritons. She became a Triton herself, and a savior of lost souls.

"I took the idea of that myth and of looking at the stars for navigation and created this theme of women wearing 16th and 17th century wigs with boats in them, which gave me an excuse to start collecting ships. I got the first one at a seafood shop on First Avenue. I saw it on the counter and asked if could borrow it, and they said yes. I kept it, but it got destroyed in a flood in my old apartment.

"Now, all my friends give me ships. They find them in the trash, at flea markets, everywhere; it ranges from old model types to brooches and pins, paper boats, and seashell boats.

"I like them because ships are vessels of transportation, and I love arriving and departing. You have this sense of reflection and introspection, and the idea that you’re so small in such a big world, that you’re sort of tiny in the middle of this powerful ocean.”