Superblue has announced its opening on December 22, with installations by leading experimental artists James Turrell, Es Devlin and collaborative tech group teamLab.
Earlier this year Superblue, a company with a series of venues dedicated to the exhibition of experimental and immersive art, announced the launch of its first exhibition. Superblue’s first venue will be an art center in Miami’s Allapattah neighborhood, opening in December despite COVID-19 restrictions.
Superblue’s first exhibition space is an abandoned 50,000 square foot industrial warehouse with over 30,000 square feet of space for installations and 5,000 square feet of space for programming. It will be the location of numerous Superblue performances and exhibitions, and will also be used for workshops, event rentals and lectures.
Superblue Exhibitions
Superblue’s first exhibition, “Every Wall Is a Door” will feature installations by the previously announced artists. The Superblue co-founder Mollie Dent-Brockenhurst says that the exhibition gives “a glimpse into the breadth of the experimental art movement and the extraordinary possibilities for the public to engage with and activate these kinds of works.”
James Turrell’s installation for Superblue, Ganzfeld, translated to ‘complete field’ in German, employs the artist’s seminal use of light and space to explore its effects on vision and perception. The fully-immersive installation features monochrome lighting which then recedes into darkness, eroding the relationship between the viewer and their surroundings. This both disorients the viewer and challenges their perceptions of life and death.
Es Devlin’s Forest of Us to be exhibited at Superblue is an immersive, multi-faceted installation that the viewer must go on an interactive journey through. The installation is a large maze of mirrors that mimics the human bronchial tubes. Equipped with mirrors, video, and sculptural elements, the viewer must navigate the maze. Within it, they encounter supplementary information about the human respiratory system before eventually emerging onto headlands surrounded by water where they can see the installation’s full shape.
Forest of Us also includes a tree-planting initiative towards Amazon reforestation, and the work is meant to recall similarities between the human and tree respiratory systems.
teamLab’s Superblue installation will combine several previous and new projects that together will express the nature of liminality. Combining elements of digital art, animation, mathematics, architecture and installation art, the all-immersive work explores the relationship between the human self and the surrounding world, life and death and the concept of time. The installation will combine te projects including Life Survives by the Power of Life; Universe of Water Particles, Transcending Boundaries; and Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together — Transcending Boundaries, A Whole Year per Hour and Proliferating Immense Life, A Whole Year per Year.
The Artists: James Turrell, Es Devlin And TeamLab
James Turrell is a leading American artist who primarily works with light and space. He is known for his Skyspaces series of enclosed areas with a sky viewpoint and Roden Crater, a natural crater in Arizona with interior observation areas. James Turrell also incorporates elements of land art in his work, using natural settings and light to create sublime landscapes and explore their relationship with the cosmos. His work experiments with human perception, illusions within space and the natural world’s relationship with the celestial.
Es Devlin is a prominent British artist and stage designer who creates large-scale, multifaceted performance installations. Her work often includes elements of projected light, film and music to create immersive digital experiences. She has designed stage sculptures for famous artists including Kanye West, U2, Beyoncé and Adele among others. Es Devlin’s background is in experimental opera and narrative theatre, but she has since branched out into sculpture and other art forms, making her an extremely eclectic abstract contemporary artist.
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Sign up to our Free Weekly NewsletterteamLab is a collaborative group of international, interdisciplinary artists, engineers, programmers, animators, architects and mathematicians based in Tokyo, Japan. The group uses its wide breadth of knowledge and media to examine the confluence of these media with the natural world. teamLab works primarily with digital art installations, challenging traditional perceptions through the employment of light and space. The group has received global recognition and acclaim for their immersive installations, and its museum in Tokyo became the most visited single-artist destination in the world in 2019.
