The Brooklyn Rail

The menagerie of animal sculptures assembled in The Ark—the fifth annual summer exhibition at The Church in Sag Harbor, New York—bears witness to a crisis, both mythic and urgently contemporary: the Great Flood. Curated by Eric Fischl, this exquisite gathering reimagines the Genesis story as a powerful metaphor for our present moment. Here, it is not just a deluge of water, but of environmental, social, and psychic upheaval.

Housed in a nineteenth-century Methodist church building thoughtfully renovated into a contemporary art space that opened in 2021 by Fischl and his wife, artist April Gornik, the exhibition’s theme is attentively tied to its architectural setting. Strategically placed animal sculptures by more than forty renowned international artists transform the venue into a modern-day ark. These creatures appear, not simply as unique beings, but as mirrors of our inner human selves—symbols of vulnerability, resilience, and shared destiny.

In discussing the exhibition, Eric Fischl noted Sag Harbor’s history as a bustling eighteenth and nineteenth-century whaling port: “The Church gallery has all the feel of a ship and was likely built by shipbuilders.” The interior renovation of the deconsecrated church reflects that nautical spirit. Exposed, weathered rafters evoke a ship’s hull—where Maurizio Cattelan’s Ghosts (2021), a flock of watchful taxidermy pigeons, perch as if on a mast. Heavy wooden beams define spatial divisions: the lower level suggests the ark’s “hold,” a suspended mezzanine its “deck,” and the rooftop terrace the “bow.” Here, Louise Bourgeois’s Spider Couple (2003), a pair of massive bronze spiders locked in a moment of copulation, presides like a guardian watching over the ark. Further deepening the exhibition’s larger metaphor with color, dark blue walls below and light blue walls above suggest turbulent seas yielding to clear skies, a hopeful ending to a fearful passage.

The expressive souls occupying The Ark embody unpredictable forces that threaten mortal existence—environmental catastrophe, the struggle to survive, and the collapse of social and moral order. Yet they also express what is most worth preserving: resilience, humility, love, and joy. Taking center stage at the exhibition’s entrance is Daniel Firman’s Le Sommeil en Forêt (The Sleep in the Forest) (2025), a life-sized elephant improbably balanced on its trunk, stretching toward the gallery ceiling. It is, quite literally, the elephant in the room—a witty play on the phrase that typically refers to the things we’d rather not confront. Defying gravity and logic, this mesmerizing pachyderm becomes both a visual marvel and a conceptual anchor, an ingenious curatorial gesture that captures our attention and draws us, heart-first, into kinship with the natural world.

Canines and cats, familiar and beloved, trigger immediate emotional connections throughout the show. Nichola Theakston’s Pariah (2025) does so with haunting intensity. Cast in bronze, it depicts the artist’s rescued podenco—a Mediterranean hunting dog and one of the most abused working animals in Spain. With its elongated snout and upright ears, the figure recalls Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian deity associated with death and protection. Theakston’s hand brings the animal to life with an aching realism; its gaze holds ours, insisting we acknowledge its sorrow and its survival.

In a striking shift of tone, Sarah Lucas’s Tit-Cat Up (2015) delivers dark comedy. A bronze cat arches its back in classic feline defiance, burdened by exaggerated heavy, sagging breasts. Absurd yet strangely tender, the sculpture satirizes gendered expectations while evoking the exhaustion of motherhood and a relentless commitment to care. Deborah Butterfield's Resting Horse (1977) elicits a similar response. Caked in mud-clay and sticks, the resting mare appears as if she was sculpted by Mother Earth, inseparable from nature but here recovering from the deluge. We feel every ounce of the heavy weight she bears, as well as her exposed vulnerability.

Kiki Smith injects a jolt of mythic fantasy into the exhibition’s consideration of female perspective. Her fierce, otherworldly Harpies (2000)—winged women from classical lore—are associated with violent winds, storms, and the underworld. Full of nature’s wrath, but also guardians of the threshold between life and death, their presence is simultaneously eerie and protective. Fischl places them in silent vigil above Rosemarie Trockel’s Creature of Habit 2 (Deer) (1990), a bronze sculpture of a dying young doe. Nearby, Claudette Schreuders’s Mr.Right (2019)—a painted bronze of a young man cradling a deer—completes a poignant visual trilogy. Together, these works form a poetic meditation on the fragility of life and our complicated entanglement with the forces of nature.

An archeological sensibility pervades the mezzanine level, where smaller works, some encased in vitrines like sacred relics or specimens in a natural history museum, reward close looking. These gems of material and process include William Kent’s fossil-like slate engravings, Jane Rosen’s fine-feathered birds, miraculously formed from hand-blown glass, and Monica Banks’s remarkably detailed porcelain replicas of fragile avians and insects presented in a museum-like display box.

But where is Noah?

Fischl laughed when I asked. “Maybe he’s drunk in the bowels of the ark,” he joked. Then, more reflective: “He was chosen to do something incredibly heroic. He’s not brilliant, but he does what he’s called upon to do. Artists face that every time they go to work—they wonder: Is this meaningful? Does this matter?” In that spirit, this exhibition proposes a collective Noah: artists building imaginative lifeboats to carry us through the storms of our time. Their works offer, not escape, but psychic sanctuaries and timeless reflections of the world we inhabit and hope to preserve.