Beyond the Sky is an immersive, large-scale video installation projected at Art Cake through Monday, September 21st. The story behind it begins and ends with a spirit of collaboration—with the tragic note of the Red Hook fire in between. Simona Prives, the visual artist behind the project, shares her collaborative journey, beginning with her work alongside Kyle Luntz and Ryan Vahey.
How did Beyond the Sky start, and how did you and sound artists Kyle Luntz and Ryan Vahey develop the animation and sound in your video?
Kyle, Ryan and I were invited to participate in a collaborative residency at The Swimming Hole in the summer of 2025, along with two other artists, Megan Suttles and Rainy Lehrman. It was an incredibly synchronous experience. The group worked together beautifully.
At the same time, I was getting ready to show a new video installation at Megan’s gallery in Red Hook, Hotwood Arts. It was my third show there.
We all worked together in this gorgeous cedar barn, surrounded by a huge variety of musical instruments, video projections, Rainy’s beautiful sculptures, and Megan’s layered photography. The whole environment felt incredibly creative and open.
Kyle and Ryan jammed on the sound while I worked on the visuals. The sounds they created were completely in sync with what I was making. The sound and visuals began to inform each other, and that became the foundation for Beyond the Sky.
The piece consists of floor-to-ceiling projections across multiple surfaces and sound that shifts as people move through the space. How do you want viewers to experience it?
We want viewers to feel like they are entering a space rather than simply looking at a projection or listening to a soundscape. Beyond the Sky is a changing, dreamlike environment. Viewers can move around the room and experience the work from different perspectives, and the experience is constantly changing. We want the piece to move through people. We want the rhythm of the work to be felt in the body, as a visceral experience.
The work is made up of hundreds of layers of analog texture, hand-shot video, animated drawings, and sound, but also layers of time. There are layers of history, the past, the present and the future, all existing at the same time. These layers overlap and blur together. Images can feel familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Landscapes shift and change. Things appear and disappear. There is a sense of growth and decay, of things being built and broken down, and of the past continuing to live inside the present.
The experience depends on what is triggered in each viewer. A sound or image might bring up a personal association or a memory. Someone might recognize something, while someone else might see something completely different. We want to create an atmosphere, both sonically and visually, where people can lose themselves for a while and let their own memories and imagination take over.
Beyond the Sky opened at Hot Wood Arts and was destroyed in the Red Hook fire four days afterward. How did you learn of the fire, and what did it mean for you and the surrounding community of artists and small businesses?
The fire destroyed the gallery and displaced dozens of artists and small businesses. It had a huge impact on a close-knit creative community built around collaboration and mutual support.
The artist community in Red Hook is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Spending time there during the show’s installation was so much fun and incredibly inspiring. There was this real sense of community among the artists that I hadn’t really experienced anywhere else, before or since.
Losing the building meant losing a physical space that had become such a big part of that community. It affected the artists, the small businesses, and everyone who had put so much time and energy into creating something there. It was a huge practical and emotional loss. But at the same time, it was amazing to see how everyone came together. Artists and neighbors supported each other and found ways to keep that creative energy going.
I found out about the fire from Megan and Ryan the next morning. They had actually watched the building burn down. It was devastating.
Your work has long engaged with notions of decay, impermanence, and rebuilding. Did the fire change how you understand a piece that explored dissolving and evolving landscapes?
The piece already has layers that allude to destruction and reconstruction, a shifting and constantly changing environment, growth and decay. So the fire and its aftermath simply added another layer to what was already there.
Beyond the Sky just lost a show. But dozens of artists lost the place they called home and, in many cases, a lifetime of work. Ryan was one of those artists. He lost his studio and his instruments. Megan, of course, lost her gallery, Hot Wood Arts, and all of her work.
A year later, you’re featuring the work at ArtCake with the fire and its aftermath folded in as a new layer, as you mentioned. What has it been like to show it again and reunite with the Red Hook community?
Bringing the exhibit back came naturally. The opening was exactly one year after last year’s opening. This felt special. Last year’s piece became the starting point, the first layer to build from.
I spent this summer adding hundreds of new layers that, on a subconscious level, integrate everything that happened over the past year and the aftermath of the fire. Kyle and Ryan did the same with the sound piece. The work has changed, but the original piece is still there underneath.
The three of us also got to perform the sound piece at the Whitney in August, which was incredibly meaningful. And having the Red Hook community at the opening was emotional and rewarding. It felt like we were bringing something back to the place and to the people who had been part of it from the beginning.
Photos courtesy of David Flores @uptownandbrown
Beyond the Sky, Saturday, September 12, 2026 5:00 PM
Monday, September 21, 2026 12:30 PM at ArtCake
Simona Prives is a Brooklyn-based visual artist whose work includes painting, drawing, and time-based media. Prives creates animated collages that incorporate a variety of themes and materials. Every artwork combines multiple forms of printmaking, intricately layering video, sound, drawings and ink paintings to assemble the composition. Often presented in life-sized projections, her work plays with time, space and perception. @simonaprives
Kyle Luntz is a Brooklyn-based artist who deals with time, emergent phenomena, illusion and memory in his multimedia installations. He makes generative audio-visual compositions which are altered by the presence and actions of participants. Using sound, light, acoustics, feedback systems, sensors and robotics, his work crosses spatial and temporal dynamics, treating time as malleable material. @kyleluntz
Ryan Vahey is a Brooklyn-based artist and musician whose interdisciplinary practice spans sound, sculpture, photography, and moving image. Across sound performances and multisensory installations, he explores the mutability of memory and the ways individual recollections are shared, transformed, and reimagined. Drawing on field recordings, analog and digital instruments, and live performance, his work considers listening as an active process through which sound, place, and memory are continually reshaped. @rvahey
About the writer: Etty Yaniv is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, curator, and founder of Art Spiel. She works in installation, painting, and mixed media, and has shown her art in exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Since 2018 she has published interviews and reviews through Art Spiel, often focusing on underrecognized voices and smaller venues. More about her art can be found at ettyyanivstudio.com and on Instagram @etty.yaniv