Barbara Noah completes her Likely Stories series through a Hatchfund project

IAS faculty member Barbara Noah successfully undertook a Hatchfund project in support of a solo exhibition of the concluding work in her Likely Stories series, which will be shown at Davidson Galleries in 2019. The series features digital images of airborne metaphoric objects that allude to aspiration and transcendence, as well as the imperilment of both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial landscapes. Many of the images express the urgency of climate change, which has sparked recent cultural consideration of the colonization of other planets. The work also poses dichotomies between a search for meaning and the urge to escape from reality, an intimate human touch in a science and tech world, and our daily intimate lives juxtaposed with unfathomably distant places. In full throttle can-do mode, the Likely Stories images are visionary surrogate selfies, parodies of and homages to the grandeur of distant skies, in which viewers, through the objects, ascend to improbable, transcendent heights, wryly reflective of the humor and pathos of the desire for human achievement and extraordinary experience.