nastein’s Articles at Noah Alexander Isaac Stein

March 12, 2026March 12, 2026

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.

August 20, 2025September 22, 2025

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.

August 20, 2025September 22, 2025

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.

March 17, 2025September 22, 2025

Upcoming April Solo Show

I’m excited to announce my upcoming solo exhibition at Blackfish Gallery! I’ve been busy working on several new large scale works for the show that I will be exhibiting for the first time, along with a collection of work from the last few years. Many of these pieces are being shown for the first time.

The show will be on display from April 2 -26 at Blackfish Gallery, 938 NW Everett St., Portland OR.
The opening reception will be on April 3 from 5 – 8 PM
I’ll be having an artist talk on Sunday, April 13 at 2 PM

From the press release:

In this new body of work Noah Alexander Isaac Stein explores dualities of interconnection and numinous experience through the lens of mind attempting to move beyond itself. With fire as a metaphor for the transformative act that simultaneously consumes and creates, A Luminous Fire from a Broken Machine approaches the potential for transcendent experience as a resolution to suffering.

Stein’s work frequently focuses on expressive painting, where interactions of oil and cold wax are used as a catalyst for spiritual epiphany, Noah’s art seeks to provide universal connection point between the artist and audience.

As a part of the exhibition, Stein’s art will be accompanied by a series of his written works which building of his synthesis of expressive and conceptual approaches.

February 1, 2025September 22, 2025

Portland Winter Light Festival 2025

I’m excited to have three installations featured in the 10th annual light festival, which runs from Feb 7 – 15.

Garden at the End of the Anthropocene imagines the growth of a new ecosystem; forgotten technology of the future melding together with unfathomable new forms of biology among the refuse of civilization. Reminiscent of both a techno-vision dream and bioluminescent fungal growth, the installation will speak to both the fate of the of human synthetic detritus, and the resilience of the natural world. Viewable at Ambient Magic Studios.

Behold the Man; at the Threshold of the Future is viewable as part of the Labyrinth of Light at East Creative Collective: “Perched between the future and the past, we stand at the threshold of possibility. We are half animal, still torn by the same desires, fears, and tribalism as our cousins and ancestors. We are half machine, forms bound to technology, and minds inexorably interlinked through code and algorithms, forebears of our future children. We aspire to be gods, ascendent over nature; we are polluted, body, soul, and mind with the plastic sparks of synthesis.”

Aurora is an in-gallery exhibition at Blackfish Gallery that draws inspiration from arctic cycles to explore light as conceptual force of meaning. Accompanying the installation is an original ambient soundscape composed by Jason Kowalski.

October 10, 2024

Drinking from the Water, Ascending into Fire, 2024

From Jung to the Abzu of ancient Sumerian myth, the watery depths are a constantly reemergent symbol for the buried psyche. A place of great danger as well as shinning treasure, it is only through a clear perception of the unconscious that the soul can break free of conditioned response and experience the ecstatic unity that is sometimes termed the divine.

What is hidden remains inexorably part of the self, and to deny it is to close in the concept of self, building barriers until the fiery light that permeates all existence becomes a tiny candle surrounded by a sea of darkness. No matter how tightly this blanket of darkness is wrapped however, nothing exists in isolation. Rather than protect the fragile ego, the severing of undesired aspects from the concept of self creates a sea of monsters; no longer part of a complete whole, the mind perceive in its own shadows independence.

In contrast, to accept hidden aspects of self is to transform the very darkness that is feared into the essence of light, which is knowledge. Once the self has achieved this wholeness, the process of incorporation may be continued, extending equally into the external world, of which the individual is an invisible a part as the unconscious is of the self. Although the individual mind is the seat of this experience, this does not contain the boundless expanse of existence inside the ego. In the light of totality, the illusion of ego is finally extinguished, and reality is at last perceived in undifferentiated glory beyond the mere human.

October 10, 2024October 10, 2024

Leviathan

It is a strange paradox that out of the collective can emerge a singular intent of direction that is against each individual constituent will. Emergent behavior like a shadowy behemoth, takes its dim form at the peripheries of our consciousness, even as its winding intricacies form an inescapable center. This paradox is at the heart of the Anthropocene. The leviathan of human progress carries us onward to an uncertain light, and we are the helpless links of its great sinews.

October 10, 2024October 10, 2024

Axis Mundi of the Flesh

Found cross-culturally, the concept of axis mundi must be understood as an intersection of both physical and psychological geography. Emerging through a variety of symbols, ranging from the cosmic world tree, to the sacred mountain, the essential element is a linkage between worlds. In the symbolic language of the soul, the roots and branches of the tree, extending from below the earth, through the trunk, into the latitudes of sky, connects these disparate elements just as the human mind links the subconscious strata of the collective animal with the divine unity of transcendent experience.

February 8, 2024February 8, 2024

PDXWLF 2024 Installation

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.

See more about it here!