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Inner Space Noah's Ark
Inner Space Noah's Ark is 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.
The work is built like a mythopoetic escape from a dream shipwreck and is made of an emergent vocabulary of abstract monochromatic gestures, recycled residual scraps of past works and personal memories, and collage cutouts from the catalogue 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.
One night, a week before making the installation, I had an experience in which my life was threatened, but I survived. I am still processing what happened. Artifacts from that night are now in this work. In the wake of a major disaster, whether personal or collective, we are profoundly altered. The imprint of that alteration 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 a choice.
This installation asks 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 – a "you cannot go on this way any longer" and then an AH! appears – a revelation, an awakening, a way forward that used to be invisible.
Katy Pinke is an artist and musician based in Brooklyn, NY. Her next work will be featured in a group show at Heroes Gallery opening February 23, 2022.
Windows at 519 Evergreen is funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts and the
New York City Department of Cultural Affairs
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