Repurposed & found materials, terracotta bricks wood planks, nails, baby grand piano, 2024
This installation by Noé Piña invites viewers to reflect on the delicate equilibrium of the systems we inhabit—personal, economic, and social. A baby grand piano, elegant and refined, yet exposed and vulnerable with its missing lid teeters at an angle, precariously supported by repurposed wood planks studded with nails. Balancing atop and beneath these planks are bricks—symbols of labor, construction, and Piña’s childhood memories of growing up next to a brick factory in Guadalajara, Mexico.
The juxtaposition of materials speaks to the fragility of balance, where the weight of luxury and class (the piano) is held in place by the raw and rough (the bricks and planks). This contrast becomes a metaphor for the tension between economic and social divisions, not presented in protest but as an enduring and unresolvable reality of the human condition.
There is a playful nostalgia in the work, evoking the teeter-totters of Piña’s youth, where balance was a physical and experiential lesson. Yet, the precariousness of this composition reminds us of the instability that comes when systems—whether personal or societal—fall out of balance. The work invites us to confront the fragility of what we often take for granted, leaving us to question: what happens when balance is lost?
The Balancing Act of Music
Artist’s Studio
Artist’s Studio