Recent Work
Obscuration of Inherent Perfection, and Revelation, 2025
Oil and wax on panel
24′′ x 18”
News
Upcoming Show: In the Heat of Becoming
I’m excited that I’ve been invited to include my piece Night in the upcoming exhibition In the Heat of Becoming, at Collective Z, at 325 Broome Street, New York. The opening reception will be from 6-9 pm on 3/19/26.
NEW YORK — Collective Z is pleased to announce In the Heat of Becoming, a group exhibition bringing together twenty artists whose work grapples with states of flux, emergence, and unresolved transformation. On view March 18 through April 11, 2026, with an opening reception on Thursday, March 19 from 6 to 9 PM, the exhibition marks a significant milestone for Collective Z as its inaugural group exhibition.
The title draws from the language of becoming — a word that holds motion, ambiguity, and possibility inside it. Not arrival, but process. Not the finished state, but the heat of getting there. Across painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography, the twenty artists in this exhibition approach transformation from radically different vantage points: the cellular and the geological, the personal and the political, the material and the psychological. What binds them is a refusal to settle — an insistence on form as something alive and still changing.
The exhibition presents new and recent work by Aleksandra Scepanovic, Betsy Jacks, Bill Buchman, Carin Kulb Dangot, Elizabeth Johnson, Heather Abshire, Jason Fondren, Jessica Tobin, Katsura Okada, Lisa Lee Freeman, Lucianna Ania, Maki Hajikano, Marieken Cochius, Marina Chistyakova, Megan Reilly, Noah Alexander Isaac Stein, Patti Jordan, Sandra Cavanagh, Sara C. Sun, and Svetlana Askenazy.
Collective Z was founded in January 2026 as a Lower East Side gallery committed to presenting work that operates at the intersection of urgency and craft — art that takes risks both formally and conceptually. In the Heat of Becoming embodies this mission, assembling a constellation of voices that individually and collectively resist easy resolution.
Upcoming Show: Synthetic Accretion
I’m excited to announce my new exhibition Synthetic Accretion. Synthetic Accretion will be a site—specific installation at Blackfish Gallery, and run from 09.03.25 – 09.27.25. Come by for the First Thursday opening on September 5!
In the synthetic transcendence of new materials, we have created substances which defy both the limits and safeguards of ecological necessity. Just as plastic once freed humanity from the restraints of chemical bonds, now synthetic culture offers us freedom from the human spirit.
In his new installation, Synthetic Accretion, Noah Alexander Isaac Stein, explores AI and plastic as parallel components of an emergent synthetic human experience. Through recovered transparent plastic waste, and shifting multicolored light, Stein mirrors the disorientation and ambient technological allure of contemporary cultural networks.
If the accumulation of microplastics in the human blood stream are a physical manifestation of synthetic process, Stein invites us to consider the immaterial synthetic as a corollary in the dream-oceans of our collective unconscious.
Art Media Agency Feature Article
Art Media Agency’s excellent new article about Portland quotes me and features a full page image of my painting Jupiter and Semele. You can download AMA 373 here, or read the text only version here.
About
Statement
The central goal of my work is to provoke, through the process of painting, direct encounters with the underlying reality beyond the self. This reality exists without obligation to the limitations of the human mind, which mundanely perceives the shadows of its own fears and desires in place of the world. To perceive the ineffable vastness that exists beyond the mind thus requires the death of internal constructions of the self. This experience is one of indescribable ecstasy and beauty, where a light greater then is capable of being contained within the individual mind reveals itself like thunder.
During the creation of my art, painting is used as a catalyst and intermediary for this process, which attempts to communicate transcendent experience through both subject and the physicalIty of the medium itself. While painting, working mediums of oil and cold wax are intentionally pushed into novel and difficult interactions that resist conscious control. This loss of control acts as a liminal expression of an accompanying psychological upheaval, which pursues points of tension until both internal and external forms merge and are simultaneously resolved in ecstatic experience.
It is my hope these paintings can act as bridge, and through the fiery residue of their creation a path can be discerned in the mind of the viewer. To this end, traces of the process are intentionally left unaltered in the forms of scrapes, gauges, and heavy impasto. If the viewer feels discomfort in these paintings, they perceive the instant of inspiration. This dissonance is the tension between a human mind that perceives suffering, destruction, and death, and a greater reality in which all phenomena shine as manifestations of indescribable perfection in the ineffable oneness of light.
Bio
Noah Alexander Isaac Stein is a self-taught artist living and working in Portland, OR. Focused on ecstatic oil paintings and large scale light-based installations, Stein’s work explores themes of spiritual transcendence, political discord, and environmental collapse.
For Stein, ecstatic experience represents both an underlying truth and the means to move beyond suffering. To communicate this to viewers, Stein explores both contemporary and traditional frameworks for their potential to provoke insight that leads to direct experience.
Shaped both by his multi-faith and bi-ethnic background, and his experiences living, working, and traveling throughout the world, for Stein all understanding draws from a common well. A current member of Blackfish Gallery, Stein is also a founding member of international peacemaking group Art Knows No Borders, and a voice for Portland artists as the president and founder of First Friday PDX.