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.