NinaJohnson

Nina Johnson presents Dripped, a group exhibition featuring the artist collective made by Astronauts, Hilliary Gabryel, and Oh de Laval. Bringing together sculpture, design, painting, and altered domestic forms, the exhibition considers water, mythology, and aspirational luxury as material, symbolic, and psychological forces—fluid systems through which desire, power, and identity circulate.

made by Astronauts presents a range of sculptural and functional works, including a chandelier, low table, floor lamp, wall-mounted mirror, and oil lamp. The collection is unified through a shared material language rooted in their signature hydroforming technique—an industrial process that uses high-pressure water to expand and manipulate metal, allowing steel and stainless steel to assume fluid, organic forms. Each work is finished with a multilayered powder coating system developed in the studio, designed to protect the surface while preserving the visible traces of fabrication, including welds and irregularities. For this exhibition, made by Astronauts collaborated for the first time with Athens-based glass specialists: hand-blown glass elements appear in the lighting works, while kiln-formed glass features in the tabletop pieces. These collaborations deepen the material vocabulary of the exhibition while reinforcing its emphasis on process, locality, and craft.

Gabryel’s practice frequently engages with the visual language of aspirational luxury, a theme she connects to Miami’s cultural landscape. Many of the furniture forms she works with can be traced to Franco Cozzo, the Italian-Australian entrepreneur whose flamboyant, Baroque- and Art Nouveau-inspired bedroom sets once promised accessible grandeur to mass audiences. In Gabryel’s hands, these hollow, vacuum-formed objects—rendered in jewel tones and punctuated with steel tacks—become sites where class aspiration, consumer desire, and gendered objecthood converge. By encasing her works in hypersexualized rubbers, Gabryel reclaims these mass-produced forms, transforming them from their original domestic function and exposing the fantasies they were built to sustain.

In Poseidon Spit by the Sea on Island of Virgins, de Laval reimagines the god not as conqueror but as vulnerable, surrounded by women who have never seen a man. Separated on the Surface but Connected in the Deep reflects on human relationships—fleeting, pleasurable, and intense— suggesting that impermanence need not be tragic but can instead register as adventure. Across her work, de Laval’s aim is insistently life-affirming: each painting pulses with excitement and desire, urging viewers toward presence and immediacy.