Noah Fischer

Pop Ark

Noah Fischer's sculpture and image-making involves manipulating fire and light. He has an artist's talent for drawing and a mechanic's talent for making materials perform. At various points he has crossed the lines that isolate sculptures and photographers, photographers and painters, painters and set designers, designer and video film maker.

In early 2007, he created Rhetoric Machine, dramatic sculptural installation for two small rooms. In room one speeches by US presidents— Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and Clinton — present the language and sounds of American warfare and pop music. In the second room, the great communicator and television host, Ronald Reagan, invokes godless Communism, the Christian bible and C.S. Lewis. In these small spaces, the audience is confronted with combinations of sound, motion and light. The result is an anti-media that pulls us behind the mesmerizing surface of the rhetoric.

The project that followed, Pop Ark, proved to be much larger and longer. Fischer is still playing with the material of verbal and visual rhetoric, and the subject is global warming. For the sound track, he mixes audio excerpts from Albert Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, a comedy routine by a very young Bill Cosby, and testamonies of environmental angst taken from less renouned contributions to YouTube (one identified as Murf). Whereas the smaller Rhetoic Machine was a solo effort, Pop Ark is a collaboration with Prem Makeig and Grégoire Paultre.

>> See the entire presentation of Pop Ark in PDF format

Pop Ark Freewheel, Noah Fischer