Arsenal Contemporary and Night Gallery are excited to inaugurate their partnership with Superbloom, a group exhibition featuring Canadian artists Claire Milbrath, Elise Rasmussen, Tammi Campbell, Wanda Koop, Larissa Lockshin and Kayla Witt, alongside artists from Night Gallery’s program, Michelle Blade, Cynthia Daignault, Mira Dancy, Catherine Fairbanks, JPW3, Lily Kwong, Kemi Onabulé and Rachel Youn. Superbloom marks the first exhibition in Night Gallery’s ongoing curatorial residency at Arsenal Contemporary in NY. 

A superbloom occurs after long periods of dry heat are interrupted by rains, reawakening dormant seeds. The rarity of this phenomenon, local only to the American Southwest, is reliant on the delicate timing of drought-like conditions to restrict invasive grasses and allow wildflowers to flourish in overabundance. This year in Night Gallery's home of Los Angeles, ash rained down as fires burned in all directions under orange skies. The same aridity that set the stage for immense loss has produced a superbloom after a most welcome sun shower. As Persephone ascends from the underworld so do we all.

To know one’s position within a cycle is to understand that you are in motion. When lingering in admiration of a full moon we are reminded of our own internal phases. In Blue Moon, Wanda Koop invites us to linger in lunar awe, echoing the phases of our own becoming. Clare Woods’ Vagus Nerve depicts a smoldering skyscape with clouds suspended in time. From the foothills of Altadena, Mira Dancy’s Gabrielino Canopy responds to the scorched terrain left by the Eaton Fire. In her signature electric palette, she conjures a forest scene that insists on renewal.

Rachel Youn’s kinetic sculptures, which fuse faux flora with mechanical systems, move in an eerily anthropomorphic manner. Youn’s engagement with animacy calls into question the distinctions between natural and man-made phenomena. In Kayla Witt’s hyperrealist painting of a strip mall psychic, she examines the tools we use to engage with the mysteries of the world. Cynthia Daignault’s Stable Diffusion 2 actualizes a found, AI generated picnic scene in the “style of Manet” as a real, oil on linen painting, closing the uncanny loop. 

Superbloom offers what urban life cannot, a suspension of time. A quiet moment in the park with a friend stretches into forever. Flower petals never rust. The moon is ever full. In this world of constant change we are reminded to enjoy it, like a puppy in a field of pansies.