NinaJohnson

WRITTEN BY NICOLAS POBLETE

Last year during Miami Art Week, I visited dozens of spaces outside of the art fair circuit: KDR gallery, homework gallery, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Rubell Museum, Andrew Reed Gallery, The Margulies Collection, MOCA North Miami, Nina Johnson Gallery, Bakehouse Art Complex, and The Bass, amongst others. This list highlights four exhibitions from those visits that are intentionally distinct. They present multiple facets of Miami, showing artists and institutions in conversation with the city’s history, heritage, subcultures, and nature.

Acid Bath House

Nina Johnson | 6315 NW 2nd Ave, Miami

December 1, 2025 – February 7, 2026

Curated by Jarrett Earnest, Acid Bath House brings together some twenty-six contemporary queer artists, an eclectic constellation of media, styles, and feelings tracing the multiplicity of queerness. Haphazardly hung, the works co-exist ostensibly without concern for aesthetic, stylistic, or historical coherence. The curatorial style is literary, leaning into Earnest’s curatorial statement. It expresses itself through quiet echoes and harsh tensions, incessantly questioning itself and inviting viewers to join in on its reflection.

Bathhouses have always been de facto queer hubs—sensual, vulgar, awkward, yet anonymous, liberated from the outside’s repressive sexual regime. Gay desire germinates from the concoction of steam and sweat contained within. The exhibition title takes its cue from an acid trip Earnest recalls in the press release. It was a gross bathhouse, porn playing on a TV, where the sauna induced an episode of psychedelic euphoria, marked both by fear and pleasure. He compares the experience to the Tibetan concept of the passage from life to death. A form of atemporal transcendence where the material self dissolves and perception deceives. A psychedelic realization ensues: all is transient all the time. Then, what is queerness without time, without identity, and without the body? What is pleasure if not a biological mechanism?

Before his untimely suicide in 2017, theorist Mark Fisher was working on a new book titled Acid Communism. Envisioning the potential of post-capitalist desire, he argued that a revival of the psychedelia of the 1960s counterculture would open a pathway for the left-wing accelerationist project. Fisher saw psychedelia as a radical force, a channel for unbound political imaginary and consciousness raising. Yet his skepticism of identity politics frequently led him to disregard the specificities of minority struggle. Acid Bath House almost seems a direct response to Fisher, asserting that queerness is (and has always been) more than identity politics: it is, in fact, a psychedelic force.

Queerness manifests in the erotica drawings of Belasco and Sadao Hasegawa, or the hazy sex scenes by Chris Martin or Nicole Wittenberg. Keith Lafuente’s Time Traveller (2025) queers the past while Steven Arnold’s Untitled (1976) envisions queerness’ origin myth in the form of a tree. Yuvil Pudik’s light-based (Kaiser)Panorama Bar (2024–25) nods to the generative anonymity of queer spaces, and Anna Betbeze’s silk and velvet installation Untitled (Stack) #8 (2025) incarnates their camp aesthetic. The unearthly appear in the sober multimedia works by Carrie Yamaoka, the kaleidoscopic paintings of Jesse Genepi, and two Constellation Pavo works by Reuben Paterson.

Earnest is not interested in defining queerness through these multiplicities. He instead honors the many shapes queerness adopts when it materializes, and posits that queer spaces are necessary for that cultivation. “In my experience,” he writes, “in places where queer people come together—a sex club, dance floor, an art gallery, a camp out—and in the things queer people make with and for each other, there is a specific energy that everyone needs if we are to survive on this planet together. The possibility of queer life is psychedelic erotica.” Acid Bath House forces you to bask in the waters of psychedelic erotica, suggesting that queerness is inherent to the genealogy of the counterculture.

Read the full article online on IMPULSE.