I’m excited to announce I am part of the 2024 Portland Winter Light Festival, with a new installation at Blackfish Gallery. The PDXWLF is amazing city-wide event, and I am please to join it once again, with a new monumental installation; Leviathan/Ouroboros.
Constructed out of a skin of recovered fishing nets and filled with local plastic trash, the installation Leviathan / Ouroboros imagines the incarnation of the Anthropocene as a self-consuming serpent.
Designed to capture the paradox of emergent behavior in a collective system spiraling heedlessly towards its own catastrophic unraveling, Leviathan / Ouroboros provides viewers with a tangible connection to abstractions of environmental collapse and spiritual isolation. The machinations of human progress carries us onward to an uncertain light, and we are the helpless links of its great sinews and the prey of its winding intricacies.
Come see it at Blackfish Gallery from February 1st – March 2nd, with extended nighttime hours from 6 PM – 10 PM on February 2nd, 3rd, 9th and 10th.
In preparation for my opening tomorrow, I’ve finished up a few final works started in 2023. I’m excited to show them tomorrow from 5 – 8 PM, along with a selection of recent works focusing on fire as symbol of the radiant and transformative nature of spiritual experience.
I’ll be at Blackfish Gallery for the duration of the opening and look forward to meeting visitors and answering questions. Refreshments will be provided.
Hope to see you there!
Noah Alexander Isaac Stein
UPCOMING SHOWS
My first show at Blackfish Gallery, Wavering Tension and Impressions of Light will open January 4th and run until February 3rd. Focusing on a new body of work, the show will highlight the role of pressure and tension in the emergence of spiritual experience.
I hope you’ll join me for the opening reception on First Thursday from 5 PM – 8 PM at 938 NW Everett St., Portland, OR.
Through both my life and my artistic practice, the last year has been a period of powerful change and transformation. Inseparable as these two aspects of an artists life are, I am excited to share the resulting works.
In addition to new body of work representative of this period, I’m extremely pleased to announce that I’ve been invited to join Blackfish Gallery in Portland, OR. Blackfish Gallery is one of the oldest cooperative art galleries in America, and includes some of the most talented artists in Portland.
My first show At Blackfish, Wavering Tension and Impressions of Light will open January 4th, and I hope you’ll join me at the First Thursday opening.
Additionally, I’ll be creating a new installation for the 2024 Portland Winter Light Festival, and looking forward to sharing more information about it in the near future.
Look forward to seeing you in January!
Noah Alexander Isaac Stein
UPCOMING SHOWS
My first show at Blackfish Gallery, Wavering Tension and Impressions of Light will open January 4th and run until February 3rd. Focusing on a new body of work, the show will highlight the role of pressure and tension in the emergence of spiritual experience. In addition to the work below, there will be several brand new piece that will be shown for the first time.
I hope you’ll join me for the opening reception on First Thursday from 5 PM – 8 PM at 938 NW Everett St. Refreshments will be provided.
NEW WORK
PDXWLF 2024
Im also excited to be part of the Portland Winter Light Festival again! For 2024 I’ll be creating a 40 ft glowing ghost net leviathan at Blackfish Gallery this February, as well as organizing an accompanying group show, “Illuminations”. Additionally, in case you missed it, I’ll be reopening my 2023 installation, Disgorged by the Ocean into Liminal Brightness (pictured) at East Creative Collective. Expect more news soon.
I’m excited to announce that I’ve been invited to join Blackfish Gallery as a member-owner. Blackfish is among the oldest continually operating collective art galleries in America, and has been a cornerstone of the Portland art scene for over 45 years. It’s been great to connect already with so many amazing artists, and I’m looking forward to my first show there in January 2024.
Like many points of modern departure the Portland airport is clean and sterile. After weeks of chaotic movements and unstable sleep, there is at last a sense of calm in the orderly collapse of the possible trajectories into the certain path of the jetway. In another time I might have felt a deep discomfort in the sterile efficiency of these surroundings. If such feelings begin to emerge now, they are quickly stymied by the chaotic tumult of the Air Condor ticketing counter and the sweating disorder of the human throng.
This is the third ticket I have purchased. Val and I have formed the sketch of a plan during her last visit; we will ride a motorcycle along the Mediterranean, through Eastern Europe, into Turkey, and following the invisible winds of instinct, at last into an abstract beyond. After a month of planning however, we are left with few plans.
As we have navigated the corridors of this new beginning there have been intricate suggestions by fate, both the subtleness of an inexplicable nose bleed of a driver, and the brutal overtness of the impact into the rear pannier of the vstrom 650 we had planned to ship from Vancouver to Rome.
Retuning from my studio a week before our scheduled departure, I am thrown into the air. There is little warning, only the sudden jolt and a brief flicker of realization. As I lay on the ground listening to the sickening crunch of metal, plastic, and glass, I notice that my torso is perfectly aligned with the wheel of the oncoming car. There is a stillness and the moment of uncertainty ends as the driver comes to a halt.
I seem uninjured, and there is even a moment of comedy. As I try to pick the heavy motorcycle up, still unsteady, I teeter on the brink, one foot in the air and the risen motorcycle is poised to fall now on the other side. A nearby bystander however grabs my upturned heel, and together we navigate back to earth.
A great misfortune? I am completely uninjured, and I have received news on my way to the airport, on a new flight to Frankfurt, that I will receive an generous payout from the driver’s insurance. Walking through the airport I look out on the distant mountains, gleaming in the sunny, and regard the polite, kind people of my city with the sudden eyes of an outsider. Confronted by the certain hubris of all plans in the face destiny, there can ultimately be only a surrender into the currents of the journey to come.
Just finished up a few new pieces, including the long in progress work Nightfall at Justice Center, another in my Kabbalah series, and a small one featuring raven:
Nightfall at Justice CenterShekhinahFirst Sunrise
Im also very excited to be part of shows with Astoria Visual Arts and Art at the Cave:
The title of this piece is taken from the opening lines of a W.B. Yeats poem; describing in apocalyptic terms the spiraling out of order into chaos, I was reminded of the pacific trash gyre and the kaleidoscopic patterns of current. While the imagery of this painting presents a tangible environmental anchor to the dream of entropic undoing, I see in these symbols an equal connection to the realms of spirit and metaphor. The endangered marine life depicted in the piece is both a literal representation of an ecosystem caught in a spiral of extinction, and also ourselves, caught in ever remoter turnings of collective action. Swept into great movements of which we are both fisher and quarry, the animals are the titanic ghosts of our collective unconsciousness, rushing towards an unknowable end. There is beauty here too however, as even in the moment of the onrush, we are left as observers of an ineffable beauty that extends into, and transcends, the gyre.
Almost finished with my PDXWLF installation! You can see it from Feb 3rd – 11th.
Opening night on Feb 3rd First Friday will also include open studios, live music, and fire dancing.
“Brightly shining from within, the installation imagines the tangible reality of ocean pollution as the dream landscape of our civilization. Gently breathing, the assemblage is both the physical and psychological flotsam of our interconnected civilization. Swimming in endless waves of plastic particulate and glowing trash, viewers will be invited into the luminous ghost net of recovered marine debris and metaphysical light.”
While in some ways this style is a natural progression from my earlier work, there is also a something distinctively new that I am very excited by. Better photos coming soon….
KeterCascade of FlameKarmic Debt Encountered During the Intermediate State of RebirthMomentary Light Reflected in Infinite DarknessSavior’s Crown
I’m excited to be teaching an upcoming workshop at Earth Space PDX! The 3 hour class will focus on practical and psychology techniques for creating art. Oil paint and other supplies will be provided. Visit the the sign-up page for more details.
Had a great time talking with John Teply as part of For the Seventh Generation. John is a great interviewer, and it was wonderful to be able talk a bit about the the role of chaos in the creative process, working internationally in areas of conflict, and the importance of environmental preservation.
