PANDORA’S EYE
An immersive sanctuary where ancient mythology awakens our memory of the living world and the origins we share.
Installation art project for the Burning Man event 2026 in Black Rock City by Hannah Yata & Joey Tanuki
The Reweaving of Pandora
Pandora’s name who means “all-gifted” or “all-giving”- is one of the oldest stories in Western mythology, and like Eve before her, has been cast as the source of human suffering. This a re-telling of her story.
Every civilization carries a creation myth and many of them center on a woman, a vessel, an opening: a moment of rupture where the world spills into being. Pandora is one of these stories, distorted by centuries of retelling twisting it into a cautionary tale about feminine curiousoity and disobedience. Pandora’s Eye reclaims this story.
What if this box was never a container of evils, but a vessel of creation itself? What if what poured out wasn’t catastrophe but consciousness- an explosion of beauty, complexity, darkness, and wonder that makes us fully alive?
Pandora’s name invokes what is not a warning, but an origin: a bloom, a bursting forth, an eruption of creation.
The paintings within the structure draw from mythological stories across cultures and millennia- civilizations that understood the world is alive and with intelligence, and the feminine as a sacred a generative force.
This mythopoetic metamorphosis was most well said by Maria Papaspyrou: “The return to the Divine Feminine is essentially a new mythology for challenging the existing patriarchal structures and for the expansion of our consciousness. It speaks of a change in our attitude toward nature, our planet, and our own bodies. To release the Goddess is to cultivate a relationship to the deep cosmic source of our psychic lives and come to care for all creation (Barings 2013). The Divine Feminine asks us to transcend our divisive ideologies, to hold a responsible presence on this planet, and to foster emotional intelligence for the generations that are to come.”
Myths are not merely stories. They are the architecture of reality. They are the structures through which we understand ourselves, our bodies, and the world we inhabit. If our myths demonize the feminine, cast matter and the body as evil, and frame nature as corrupt, we will cease to care for the living world. The Eye of Pandora proposes a different myth - one in which creation is sacred, the feminine is sovereign, and wonder is the most radical act available to us.
Who We Are
Hannah Yata is an oil painter based in Lords Valley, Pennsylvania, working at the intersection of Old Master technique and visionary tradition. Her large-scale figurative paintings draw on magical realism, surrealism, and symbolic art to explore themes of healing and transformation — rendered through the layered language of nature, psychedelics, and alchemical imagery. Rooted in a lifelong reverence for the natural world, her work carries the weight of myth and the intimacy of personal transformation.
Joe Di Marco (Aka Tanuki) is a master woodworker and builder based in Wassaic, NY whose practice bridges design, fine wood crafting, and large scale construction. With six years of experience at Burning Man- and four working with the Department of Public Works helping build the infrastructure of Black Rock City itself- Joe brings a special combination of technical mastery and deep understanding of what it means to create structures in extreme environments. His discovery of the set of 200-year-old Thai temple panels reciprocal roof structure became the catalyst for Pandora’s Eye- a project that unites sacred architectural space with Yata’s monumental paintings.
For more information:
How It Started
“ In the beginning there was a Tanuki and Usagi, and they fell in love. “
- The Tanusagi 1:1
Hannah Yata is a visionary oil painter who spent years feeling called to create something at Burning Man. The right opportunity arrived when she met her partner, Joe Di Marco — a master woodworker and builder with six years at Burning Man, four of which were spent helping build the infrastructure of Black Rock City itself.
As their relationship grew, so did their creative vision. When Joe discovered a set of 200-year-old Thai temple panels that were calling for a new purpose, everything clicked into place. The Eye of Pandora was born.
Together they are building a temple-like structure from these reclaimed sacred panels, filled with Hannah’s large-scale oil paintings. The space is designed as an invitation — to reflect on the moment of creation, the dance of the Divine Feminine, and our connection to the consciousness that moves through all living things.
They believe we are living through a moment of profound fracture — politically, ecologically, spiritually — and that art which reconnects people to wonder and to each other has never been more necessary. Burning Man is one of the few places left where that kind of encounter is truly possible: tens of thousands of people stepping outside their ordinary lives, open to being moved, open to being changed.
Hannah and Joe have received partial funding through the Burning Man Honoraria Grant and are now raising what they need to bring this vision fully to life. Working with a materials-only budget, they are currently about $10,000 short of their total completion budget, and rising transportation costs have left them roughly $20,000 short of what they need to get the installation to the playa. Every contribution, at any level, makes a real difference.
Every dollar raised helps build the structure, transport the materials, and create a sanctuary on the playa - a space for wonder, reflection, and shared experience.
