For Love, For Luck, For Longing is an immersive exhibition born from Annaliese Rittershaus Neff and Dan Neff’s fascination with whales, history, and the yearning held within handmade maritime love tokens. At its heart is the romance of distance: the pull of the sea, the ache of separation, and the earnestness with which sailors and whalers carved, stitched, and painted desires into physical form. These objects were not merely decorative—they carried longing, humor, lust, devotion, superstition, and the hope of return. Exhibiting both extraordinary craftsmanship and amateur skill, early American Scrimshaw’s carvings of whales, poetry, and nudes serve as both regional historical artifacts, and deeply personal individual expressions.

Among the bawdy, irreverent, and often erotic works created at sea “he’s-at-homes” — handmade dildos carved from various materials and intended to sustain intimacy and trust while devoted partners remained apart for months or even years. Often omitted or obscured in the name of decency, these intimate objects may also be understood as extensions of “forget-me-not” and “wait-for-me” traditions: tokens of desire, fidelity, and remembrance. Through sculpture, found objects, video, and atmospheric sound, For Love, For Luck, For Longing reimagines this visual language of yearning and hope. Ghost whales, the ache of longing, and tender truths of handmade tokens drift together through a world shaped by desire, absence, memory, and enduring love.

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Annaliese Rittershaus Neff is a sculptor and video artist exploring the interplay of captured light, moving image, historical objects, and atmospheric sound. Drawn to objects that carry traces of memory, loss, and devotion, Neff creates immersive environments in which the past is both preserved and unsettled. Her current work examines yearning across prolonged absence and the emotional lives embedded within material things.

Dan Neff arrived at his practice through the unconventional paths of submarine welding, moonshining and distilling, and love of beach combing for ceramic fragments and artifacts. An obsessive explorer of historical rabbit holes and a devoted Moby Dick re-reader, he is fascinated by whaling history, maritime folklore, and the peculiar objects we create to preserve.