At Art Basel Miami Beach 2024, Night Gallery presents Tide Pools, a curated presentation of new works by artists from our roster and recent programming: Farley Aguilar, Sarah Awad, Hayley Barker, Michelle Blade, Ross Caliendo, Susan Chen, Claire Colette, Márcia Falcão, Bambou Gili, Paul Heyer, Wanda Koop, Tahnee Lonsdale, Keita Morimoto, Robert Nava, Kemi Onabulé, Brie Ruais, Hasani Sahlehe, Melanie Schiff, Elaine Stocki, Jane Swavely, Claire Tabouret, Ben Tong, Sterling Wells, Clare Woods, Rachel Youn, and Coco Young. Their works suggest art as a site for experimentation, evolution, and discovery.
Tide pool habitats are home to especially adaptable animals who must cope with constantly changing environmental conditions. Artists themselves must be resourceful and adaptive, forming communities to survive and create amid unstable climates.
Koop, Barker, and Wells reflect on their immediate and more cosmic environs. Koop memorializes our rapidly disappearing landscapes with an eye towards the hopeful possibilities of art making itself. Wells’s plein air landscapes of sites around Los Angeles County suggest an off-kilter anthropology. In Mansions sliding into the DDT contaminated sea (Palos Verdes, CA) (2024), Wells explores wealth disparity and environmental degradation along the coast; even the most privileged residents are subject to toxins and climate disaster. Barker presents a new Valentine Path painting which memorializes a garden she tended at her former home. The artist takes inspiration from Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series as she captures her own sacred space in various shades of light, depending on the phase of the moon. All of these canvases meditate on private and public losses and on the passage of time.
Tong, too, engages with southern California light. The artist uses both physics and intuition to guide his dynamic practice. While recognizable elements such as flowers, vases, a chandelier, or a tree may appear, Tong blurs them into reflections and refractions of light.
The body is its own kind of test site, and Falcão and Ruais engage ideas about physicality. These artists integrate dance, ritual, and movement into their work as they explore the tensions between stasis and change. Falcão’s oil paintings depict women in movement—they practice capoeira, twirl, and find freedom in their rhythms. Ruais performs atop mounds of heavy clay, spreading it with her body into expressive new forms. Her ever-changing glazes and firing techniques require attention to the transformative properties of heat.
Nava and Sahlehe transcend the world as they know it. Nava envisions otherworldly taxonomies while Sahlehe revels in the possibilities of abstraction. Nava’s new painting Forgiveness Swan (2024) depicts a three-headed, mythical being that appears to emerge from chaos: Windows, eyes, and fields of green and blue suggest a roiling energy both primordial and contemporary. While a lightning bolt in the corner conjures an ongoing storm, the swan’s prominence may augur a moment of grace. Sahlehe pours solid bars of bright, acrylic gel onto canvas; his viscous medium burbles and pools. These fields play off sections of airbrushed raw canvas, creating a lyrical interplay of texture and color. As they build new worlds, both painters imagine alternate future possibilities.
Altogether, these artists embrace empiricism and imagination as they develop new ways of looking at the world. Their works encourage fair visitors to take a similarly methodical, conscientious approach to their own viewership and modes of living.