A gangly giraffe with splayed legs dips her neck delicately. A muscled panther strides purposefully and a life-size elephant balances on the tip of his trunk.

Wonder, delight, a mystical connection to something outside ourselves and joy —- these are all the feelings artist Eric Fischl, curator of a new exhibition at The Church in Sag Harbor hopes to engender. "The Ark," on view through Sept. 1, offers an unexpected view of the animal kingdom through the eyes of contemporary artists. It's comprised of sculptures made by 41 artists from Daisy Youngblood's 12-inch-tall "Little Gorilla" to a 12-foot-tall "Spider Couple" by Louise Bourgeois. (Bourgeois' parents were weavers, and she built spiders as an homage to her mother.) Fischl said they looked for works that would "create a wonderland." He added, "It's just going to be one wow after another."

Sublime as they all are, there's a reason Fischl, like a modern-day Noah, gathered them all together: empathy and a rebirth. "Call me foolish, but I think that history has shown us that there are times when we're able to pull together and get rid of differences in order to revive values, revive visions, revive dreams ... as a community," he said. "It's really about opening yourself up to connections, to otherness. I think that's sometimes easier for us to do with animals than it is to do for us, but it's through that that maybe we can we connect with each other."

The delightful menagerie includes powerful works created by some of the most important artists of the past 100 years. Maurizio Cattelan, Bryan Hunt, Sherrie Levine, William Kentridge, Bruce Nauman, Charles Ray, Susan Rothenberg, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Kiki Smith usually command solo shows at major museums, and they're just a handful of the artists presented.

Whether crafted of wire, wood, clay or 3D printed polymers, almost every animal is recognizable, but some hold fascinating secrets. "Tom Deininger is a sculptor who makes things that I have no idea how he makes them. From the front they look absolutely like a coherent thing," Fischl noted. "But when you go to the other side, you see that this piece is made out of just fragments of collected disposed plastic stuff like Barbie dolls, superheroes and bottle caps."

Daniel Firman's enchanting elephant, "Le Sommeil en Forêt (The Sleep in the Forest)" is actually born from a surrealist vision. Jim Dine's towering "Bird Me and Tool," sports a macaw's resplendent feathers. Lurking behind it is a monumental pair of pliers. Is it about the hand of the artist and the tools of his work, or something else? "When you see it from the pliers side, he's transformed the pliers into a T. Rex, and it's about to bite the head off [of the bird]. It has the feeling of how kids play. They'll turn a pair of pliers into a T. Rex," Fischl laughed, adding, "of course, that's open to interpretation."

Opening art up is core to The Church's mission. Since 2021, when Fischl and his wife, artist April Gornik, launched the nonprofit space, they've been focused on demystifying art, so that more people will make it part of their lives. To further that, they invited the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum onboard, delivering a large wooden ark to its lawn for a community art project. Children, adults, artists and everyone else can contribute drawings, small sculptures, or any other kind of animal to the ark. Could someone bring their favorite stuffed bear and add it to the installation? "That would be a dream come true," Fischl said. "It's definitely meant to be something that's not fixed. It's something that people can add to."

There's a series of talks and demonstrations planned to augment the exhibition, and it's accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog, featuring essays by many of the artists. If the exhibition brings crowds, that will be great, Fischl said. But it's really about something else. "There are the artists on the other side of each object who open themselves up to feeling. They're saying 'You're not alone here. We feel this way.' And that in itself is a hopeful experience."