Superblue to Launch Experiential Art Venue in Miami – Barron's

“It’s about creating these very incredible and mind-blowing immersive installations,” says Dent-Brocklehurst, Superblue’s CEO. 

It’s also about making large-scale experiential art available to as many people as possible, and supporting artists and studios that don’t make conventional objects that can be purchased and hung on a wall. 

The Miami show, titled “Every Wall Is a Door,” was originally scheduled to open on Dec. 22, but was postponed until “early spring.” It will feature works by
James Turrell,
“the father of experiential art, in our minds,” Dent-Brocklehurst says, as well as teamLab, a group out of Tokyo that is probably the most well-known in the field of experiential art. Also featured will be Es
Devlin,
who is breaking into the field, “but who is brilliant and incredibly thoughtful,” she says.

Each will have a space between 8,000 and 12,000 square feet to create their art. Superblue has a multi-year lease on the space in Miami’s Allapattah neighborhood—allowing it to bring in future installations. The show going up in the spring will be in the space at least through 2022. 

The idea for Superblue grew out of Dent-Brocklehurst’s many years in the art business, including a recent two-year project with Future City in the U.K. called Future/Pace, which focused on creating site-specific public art. 

“I’ve seen the emergence of these groups of artists, whether single artists or collectives, making these amazing [works], often fueled by technology, but also fueled by a desire to reach a much wider audience than perhaps the traditional art world would afford them,” Dent-Brocklehurst says. 

“The gallery model doesn’t really support them in a way—there’s no object to sell,” she says. While experiential art has been sold to museums, this offers “a direct relationship between the consumer and the artist, rather than via a patron.” 

At the moment, Superblue is working with 23 artists and is interested in engaging with more. “We are not bound by the rules of this gallery or that gallery,” Dent-Brocklehurst says. “We are looking for people [who] we feel could make a meaningful engagement in the kinds of productions we want to create.”

The group intends to support their artists in various ways, including the establishment of additional venues each of which will allow the experiential exhibitions to be available to the public for up to a year—longer than the typical gallery or museum show. But Superblue will also commission works, and will support their artists’ projects in other locations, Dent-Brocklehurst says. 

“Their work is about social impact, sustainability, community engagement—forces for good in the world,” she adds. There’s a “feeling we could do something significant by opening these spaces, by driving traffic to them, by supporting the artists, by supporting their values, and our own values as well.”

At Superblue’s Miami Experiential Art Center this spring, Turrell’s Ganzfeld—work that “examines the effects of light and space on the mechanics of vision as well as conscious and unconscious modes of seeing,” according to a press statement—will fill a room with monochrome lighting. 

teamLab, meanwhile, will bring a suite of interconnected works that explore the “ambiguity between living and non-living states of being and the relationship between humanity and the natural world,” according to the statement. Many of the works will shift with how the audience interacts with them and the surrounding works, creating “one-time-only visual effects that can never be replicated,” Superblue said.

Devlin also explores the connections between humans and the natural world in Forest of Us, a project created from a “massive mirrored maze that resembles bronchial structures,” Superblue said.“Es’s project is all about connecting the way we breathe—our lungs—with trees, and if you look at a black-and-white image of a lung and a black-and-white image of a tree, they are almost an identical image, except upside down,” Dent-Brocklehurst says. “Her project is about making you understand and realize these two things are interconnected.”