Her print, Life on Mars, represents a connection to space travel and future surrogate homes away from Earth. Noah says in her work, “a search for meaning alternates with a desire to escape from reality through the balm and comfort of humor. The juxtapositions of unassuming objects and magnificent cosmic contexts are deadpan and absurd, simultaneously ridiculous and sublime.”

“I became interested in the cosmos as a child when a neighbor showed me Saturn through a telescope. The experience provoked a euphoric dream, in which Saturn was large in the night sky, visible without magnification due to a hole in the universe that functioned as a pinhole camera. Such influences later propelled me write to NASA to ask to go on a mission as an artist in space. Although that hope did not materialize, I eventually realized my youthful ambition metaphorically through my work via surrogate objects launched into the cosmos.”

Barbara has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Kala Art Institute in the Bay Area; the Municipal Art Gallery in Los Angeles; Center On Contemporary Art, Seattle Art Museum and the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle; the Portland Art Museum in Oregon; Artists’ Space, MoMA P.S.1, and The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York; the City Museum in Nakhodka, Russia; the Shenzhen Art Institute Gallery in China; and the Biennial Exhibition of La Jeune Gravure Contemporaine-Paris.

©2004 Barbara Noah, all rights reserved, on changes and additions to the original, pre-edited Mars background image courtesy of NASA/JPL/Cornell.

Courtesy of Davidson Galleries.