DARBY MILBRATH
The Raving Ones
November 14, 2025 - January 16, 2026
Arsenal Contemporary, New York in collaboration with Night Gallery, Los Angeles and Pangée, Montreal, is pleased to announce The Raving Ones, a presentation of new paintings by Darby Milbrath. This is the artist's inaugural solo exhibition in New York.
There is a pulse to so many things. The slow to rapid heartbeat of our bodies; the tempo of music; the rhythm of waves breaking and receding. All of these examples synchronize in The Raving Ones by Milbrath. The title derives from the English translation of “maenads” (from maínomai, Greek, meaning “to rave, to be mad; to rage”), who were mortal women transformed by their cult following of Dionysus, the god of wine, fertility, insanity, and religious frenzy. In their devotion, the maenads developed rituals of ecstatic dancing. They embodied a wild, primal state at odds with societal norms, deserting their families for wooded hills where dance, intoxication, and a loss of self-control led to divine communion and fulfillment.
In the personas and rituals of maenads, Milbrath locates dualities of devotion and addiction, passion and lunacy, wakefulness and dreaming. She portrays a dark, shadow-side of feminine psyches and experience. The paintings depict women who appear to be in trance-like states, as if coming down from ecstatic revelry. Their darkness is illuminated by Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow self, which theorizes that integrating disowned aspects of our personality is crucial for psychological and spiritual wholeness. Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson argued that Dionysian ecstasy, an innate and now repressed state of the human condition, can be a tool for integrative wholeness.
Milbrath’s studio is in Victoria, British Columbia, overlooking a moody stretch of the Salish Sea. In the distance, the water meets the Olympic Mountains, alternately radiant and shadowed. While making this body of work, the artist experimented with painting under the influence of plant medicines and flower essences, growing and ingesting blue and purple flowers that are connected to intuition, psychic abilities, and protection from negativity. The palette of the sea and flowers emphasizes dark, hypnotic blues.
Milbrath builds up her surfaces and disrupts them many times over, transforming the remains in subsequent studio sessions. For example, several of the canvases began with multiple figures that were slowly enveloped by dark pigments, leaving only a solitary figure behind. Milbrath’s process thus liberates and destroys a developing composition, like a Dionysian frenzy that sows disorder through devoted acts of wildness and chaos.
The pulse of the waves was a constant companion throughout the creation of The Raving Ones, an intense life force that exaggerated Milbrath’s remoteness and influenced her atmospheric depictions of loneliness. Her figures can appear lost in their surroundings, as if on the fringes of abstracted environments, looking inwards. Such dream states can allow for dissolution, inversion, and enfolding the shadow-self.
- Clara May Puton