Superblue Miami opens in Allapattah neighborhood

Superblue Miami, the new venture dedicated to producing, presenting, and engaging audiences with experiential art, opened its doors on May 20th, 2021, offering visitors of all ages unprecedented access to a dynamic range of large-scale experiential artworks and iconic installations. Superblue Miami inaugural program, Every Wall Is a Door, features the debut of a new immersive environment by Es Devlin, a transcendent digital experience by teamLab, and an enveloping light-based Ganzfeld work by James Turrell.

Upon entrance to Superblue Miami, visitors encounter Amsterdam-based artist studio DRIFT’s kinetic installation titled Meadow . Representing artists working across the spectrum of experiential art, Superblue Miami’s installations offer visitors an unparalleled opportunity to be transported to an array of new worlds in a single visit. 

Located in Miami’s Allapattah neighborhood directly across from the Rubell Museum, Superblue Miami transforms an unused 50,000 square foot industrial building into a centrally located cultural resource for the South Florida community and visitors to the region. Featuring more than 30,000 square feet of flexible installation space, Superblue Miami was conceived for the presentation of large-scale works that immerse and engage visitors as part of the art experience.

Additionally, the venue includes a 5,000-square-foot flexible programming and events space to support Superblue’s robust year-round program of talks, performances, workshops, family programs, as well as event rentals; and a shop featuring artist-inspired items. Blue Rider, an outdoor cafe offering a Mediterranean and European inspired menu, will open soon.

Every Wall is a Door Inaugural Installations:

James Turrell: AKHU

A forefather of the experiential art movement, James Turrell engages viewers with the limits of human perception. Emblematic of the artist’s investigation into perceptual phenomena through the exploration of light, volume, and scale, Ganzfeld works such as AKHU bring viewers into the powerful, felt experience of light itself. Ganzfelds are large-scale installations that immerse visitors in a room of monochrome lighting, in which the dimensions of space are sensed before light moves to a complete dissolve. With no object on which to focus their vision, visitors experience a change in depth perception and possibly a feeling of disorientation.

teamLab: Between Life and Non-Life
Bringing together new and recent projects by teamLab in one all-encompassing experience, this suite of interconnected artworks​ ​takes audiences on an​ ​exploration of the ambiguity between living and non-living states of being and the relationship between humanity and the natural world. The installation is the culmination of the collaborative practice of teamLab, an interdisciplinary collective of artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, and architects that aims to transcend boundaries of perception, demonstrate the continuity of time, and explore the relationship between the self and the world. The installation includes:

• Massless Clouds Between Sculpture and Life – Making its global debut at Superblue Miami, Massless Clouds Between Sculpture and Life places audiences in a space filled from floor to ceiling with giant floating clouds. The boundaries between this floating sculpture, the space, and the body are ambiguous, allowing visitors to immerse their bodies in the sculpture. Even when physically pushed through, the sculpture will break and naturally repair itself like a living thing. However, as with living things, when the sculpture is destroyed beyond what it can repair, it cannot mend itself, and it collapses.
• Life Survives by the Power of Life II – This new 8K single channel monitor work renders the Japanese character of life, 生 (sei), in a three-dimensional space to express the depth, speed, and power of the brushstroke. The work shifts between this three-dimensional rendering and a flattened, two-dimensional version of the character to reflect the indivisible state of the self and nature and the reality that existences that appear to be distinct are actually part of a single whole.
• Universe of Water Particles, Transcending Boundaries– Visitors will enjoy this responsive, interactive installation that will surround them in a digital continuum of water particles that appear flattened in what teamLab calls “ultrasubjective space.” Visitors will influence the flow of water as they journey through the installation and as the water parts around them. The flow of the waterfall also influences the Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together installation, causing the flowers in the latter to scatter.
• 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– Audiences will experience a computer-generated continual cycle of a seasonal year of flowers growing, blossoming, withering, and decaying. As visitors move through the installation, flowers stepped on will result in scattered petals and wither. Flowers that are observed in stillness grow abundantly – reflecting the importance of balance between humanity and nature and uncertainty about how much of the ecosystem is a result of natural processes versus human interaction.

Es Devlin: Forest of Us

Forest of Us takes as its starting point the striking visual symmetries between the structures within us that allow us to breathe and the structures around us that make breathing possible: the bronchial trees that exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide within our lungs and the trees which exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen within our environment. The work begins as a film. The screen surface is periodically perforated, allowing viewers to walk through the film into a mirror maze. Devlin’s use of the mirror maze draws on her reading of contemporary eco-philosophers who use the “hall of mirrors” as a metaphor for the glimmering feedback loops of human design that enchant our gaze so seductively, we lose awareness of our symbiotic connection to rest of the biosphere.

SUSPENSION: Meadow by DRIFT

Meadow , a kinetic installation by DRIFT, is the first installment of Superblue Miami’s Suspension program that elicits disbelief and provokes engagement with the ordinary environment, rendered extraordinary.  DRIFT is a multidisciplinary studio founded by Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta creating experiential sculptures, installations, and performances. Meadow is a poetic, upside-down landscape evoking the impermanence of nature and the sense of wonder that comes from being immersed in it. The installation enacts an ever-changing performance of mechanical flowers in perpetual bloom. Meadow is the result of the artists’ investigation of how an inanimate object can mimic the subtle changes in nature.

Visiting Superblue Miami

Superblue Miami is located at 1101 NW 23rd St, Miami, FL. Tickets begin at $36 for adults. Students, Seniors (65+), Military personnel (with ID) $34; Frontline Healthcare Workers $34; Children (3-12) $32; teamLab’s Massless Clouds Between Sculpture and Life Add On $10. Tickets are available at superblue.com.

Timed ticketing, controlled visitor capacity, and a single-direction flow through the installations are key to achieving the intended experience of each work and support a socially-distanced visit.

For more information about Superblue, visit superblue.com or follow @superblue.art on Instagram and @superblueart on Twitter.

ABOUT SUPERBLUE

Superblue is a groundbreaking new enterprise dedicated to supporting artists in realizing their most ambitious visions and engaging audiences with experiential art. Its network of artists encompasses the leading practitioners of experiential art, whose practices catalyze engagement with the most pressing issues of our time and generate new perspectives on our world.

Through its experiential art centers, which are specifically designed for presenting large-scale, immersive art installations, Superblue provides artists with expanded opportunities to transport audiences to the new worlds they create. Superblue additionally acts as an advocate and agent for experiential artists by fostering opportunities for them to expand the reach of their work through collaborations with museums, collectors, visual and performing arts festivals, architects, municipalities, and place-makers. Superblue provides these partners with unparalleled expertise and support for the production, installation, and presentation of large-scale experiential works, through collaborative presentations, public and private commissions, and acquisitions. In the coming years,

Superblue will open new experiential centers across the US and internationally and is developing augmented and virtual reality platforms for artists who are exploring our rapidly evolving relationship with the digital realm.