Inner Space Noah's Ark, (2021-2022), installation/assemblage, dimensions site-specific
Inner Space Noah's Ark began as a mixed media ritual around inner language, the experience of the symbolic power of animals and the natural world, and the transformation that occurs in the survival of catastrophic events. I first installed it as a commission with ABC No Rio at 519 Evergreen Ave in Bushwick. I will be installing a second iteration of the piece at Heroes Gallery, NYC, for the group show GNAW, opening on February 26, 2022. This second iteration explores the same themes but focuses on the spiralic nature of letting go.
The work is a site-specific and site-responsive installation, and Iβll activate it by periodic adjustments/subtractions during the run of the show. It is built like a mythopoetic escape from a dream shipwreck and is comprised of an evolving, emergent vocabulary of abstract monochromatic gestures, whose forms are echoed by handmade animal puppets, assemblages of recycled residual scraps of past works and personal memories, and collage cutouts from the catalog of a Morgan Library Museum 2017 exhibit (on ancient Mesopotamian animal art which centered on the earliest recorded version of the Noah's ark story).
The work began as a ritual I created to process a near-death experience that I survived the week before the initial install. I incorporated artifacts from that experience into the installation (including the cardboard cup-holder that my would-be assaulter left in the front seat of my car after he fled, and a paper cross that a cop named Alberto made for me minutes later in an attempt to comfort me with a story about Jesus). When I took the installation down, I ceremoniously tossed out those two artifacts.
With this piece I am thinking about how in the wake of a major disaster, whether personal or collective, we are profoundly altered. The imprint is a sorting process; we see what we need to take with us onto the ark, and what we must leave behind. Sometimes the destruction of the flood doesn't leave us with a choice. I am thinking about the kind of liberation that comes in the wake of catastrophe. I like the name Noah because there is a "no" and an "ah." G-d (or some inner voice beyond ego) comes down with a NO β a "you cannot go on this way any longer" and then an AH! appears β a revelation, an awakening, a way forward that used to be invisible.
At Heroes Gallery, Iβll be completing and refining that sorting process in a continuation of the ritual.
An earlier version of these thoughts was originally published on ABC No Rioβs website, here.
More writing from the piece, about ark/cs and circles, apocalyptic digestion, translation and breathing underwaterβcan be found here.
Further thoughts on the new iteration of the installation also here.
