Gigi Scaria, Trapped, 2015

Gigi Scaria’s suite of paintings, graphite drawings and animation videos, ‘The Ark’, resonates with one of the world’s oldest and grandest myths: the Flood. The Biblical account of the Flood dramatizes the vexed relationship between humankind and nature. An angered God inflicts a cosmic catastrophe on the earth. Forewarned, Noah survives, with his family and various animal and plant species he has herded into a fragile sanctuary, a ship that floats through the planet-drowning deluge. This Old Testament story originates in Mesopotamian mythology: Noah is an avatar of the Sumerian Ziusudra, the Babylonian Atrahasis and the Assyrian Utnapishtim, founders of a new, chastened order.

The Ark functions as a guarantee of continuity, a zoological and botanical archive of the antediluvian past. Scaria maps onto the Ark narrative his preoccupation with contemporary Anthropocene urgencies: hyper-urbanization, environmental devastation, global warming, and other outcomes of humankind’s bizarre commitment to destroying its habitat and ensuring its own extinction. These works are imbued with the tenor of dystopian science fiction. Scaria re-formats the Ark as a ziggurat-vessel built from containers and impaled on a peak, or as a citadel-ship marooned in a fissured landscape of depleted resources. Noah’s Ark, in Scaria’s version, is Spaceship Earth.

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Gigi Scaria

Chemould Prescott Road

Chemould CoLab

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Gigi Scaria

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