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.

Darby Milbrath (b. 1985, Victoria, British Columbia) approaches painting as an intuitive and spiritual act to visualize the sublimity of nature as well as complexities of the psyche, identity, and lived experiences. Her diaristic paintings situate subjects in imagined environs, generating mystical spaces in which she strives to transcend hidden emotions, illusions, and coping strategies. Informed by her formal training in contemporary dance and herbalism, Milbrath’s practice is rooted in a sense of movement that engages music, ritual, and strategies of embodiment within a framework of deeply felt spirituality and connection to nature. Milbrath is represented by Pangée (Montréal). Recent solo exhibitions include Marne Repulse at Pangée (2024, Montréal); Vesper at Painters Painting Paintings (2023, online); and Through the Veil at Night Gallery (2021, Los Angeles). Recent group exhibitions include Arcadia and Elsewhere at James Cohen (2024, New York); World Beyond World at 1969 (2024, New York); and Hic Sent Dracones at Deli Gallery (2023, CDMX). Her work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, CICA Vancouver, and the Royal Bank of Canada, amongst others. She is based in Victoria, British Columbia. 

Press release by Clara May Puton. Artwork images by Rachel Topham and Lance Brewer. Installation images by Greg Carideo. The Raving Ones continues at Arsenal Contemporary NY until January 17, 2026.