Read on as participating flood artists tell us about their new commissions, all debuting on June 21, 2025. Be sure to get your tickets to flood to see these artworks in action!

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Matt Barton on Dream Job, 2025.

Black Cube: Tell us about the artwork you’re creating for flood.

Matt Barton: Three "characters" are being hired and given behavioral directives for the event. The characters typically are hired for birthday parties, but will instead be engaging at flood in a manner that heightens the inherent straddling of fantasy and reality, and the incongruous nature of their place in our culture.

BC: How does your forthcoming artwork engage with one or more facets of flood’s curatorial frame—of pool parties, of leisure, of environmental catastrophe?

MB: There is an aspect of loss of innocence and embracing reality to the piece.

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Amber Cobb on Floating is a Form of Resistance, Playing is an Act of Defiance, 2025.

Black Cube: Tell us about the artwork you’re creating for flood.

Amber Cobb: Drawn to the exhibition’s prompt to create “spaces that challenge how we engage with art and, by extension, with one another,” I am creating a series of five floating sculptures designed for the pool. Rendered in the illustrated font I developed while exploring the nuances of nonverbal communications, the forms spell the word “FLOAT.” Like body language, the font resists legibility. It leans toward expression over clarity, it's mutable and open to interpretation.

Each sculpture is a letter that breaks away from the constraints of the font's established grid. The forms stretch and expand, taking on gestures that mirror the physical and emotional negotiations we move through in shared space. The sculptures will float independently while continually shifting, converging, and drifting apart reflecting the ways communities gather, separate, and come back together over time.

BC: How does your forthcoming artwork engage with one or more facets of flood’s curatorial frame—of pool parties, of leisure, of environmental catastrophe?

AC: It engages physically within a pool setting and the act of ‘partying in the face of disaster.’ The world feels like it's collapsing, and we are ‘flooded’ with a range of emotions. To stay afloat is to survive; to play is to defy the pull of despair. Both are a form of resistance that rejects the pressure to sink under the chaos. Floating appears passive, but it takes active and delicate movements to remain calm and be still in unstable conditions. Playing appears frivolous, yet it’s a profound gesture to laugh and feel joy. It's a rebellion to remain soft, tender, and fluid in uncertainty.

Situated within the context of a swimming pool, a public space that challenges structures of fixed positions and dissolves the boundary between public and private. As bodies drift and float, occasionally they brush against one another; at times, they collide. These accidental encounters become invitations to connect, to drift together, or to quietly recede. Using the same material as pool noodles, the sculptures invite physical interaction and playful exploration.

These forms serve as floating devices or create soft spatial boundaries within a communal setting, offering individuals a moment to break away from the energy of others and float alone in stillness.

BC: What are you currently listening to, reading, and/or dreaming about (bonus points if it's related to flood)?

AC: Lately, I’ve had A Beat to Make it Better by Thandii on repeat, playing the album straight through each time. During longer studio days focused on production, I tend to lean into podcasts and explore a range of genres. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been especially drawn to ones hosted by comedians. I’ve been loving So True with CalebHearon. Perhaps I’m biased since we both grew up in Missouri but his conversations with other creatives feel like sitting in on a thoughtful and funny night with friends. Amy Poehler’s Good Hang offers a similar balance of humor and friendly vibes but with unexpected insights.

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Anthony Garcia Sr. on scorched, 2025.

Black Cube: Tell us about the artwork you’re creating for flood.

Anthony Garcia Sr.: This digitally printed towel transforms my signature layered mountain landscapes and vibrant textile-inspired stripes into a functional art piece. The design reflects the energy of a southwestern sunset, merging cultural tradition with everyday utility.

BC: How does your forthcoming artwork engage with one or more facets of flood’s curatorial frame—of pool parties, of leisure, of environmental catastrophe?

AG: The striped composition evokes both woven textiles and the visual distortion of water, suggesting a landscape submerged or refracted—inviting viewers to consider how joy, ritual, and color persist even amid climate precarity and shifting ecological horizons.

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Rick Griffith on Resting.,.,, 2025.

Black Cube: Tell us about the artwork you’re creating for flood.

Rick Griffith: We have already done our best. We have already asked and answered what will Black people do to promote the idea that all Black lives are powerfully connected to American history and American progress. Now while we might rest. What will white people do to promote the same. The work is entirely yours, you can capitulate to the erasure of our contribution, you can risk your own power asserting that there is a continued benefit to lifting up the value of Black people and their labor here. However, for the meantime we rest.

BC: How does your forthcoming artwork engage with one or more facets of flood’s curatorial frame—of pool parties, of leisure, of environmental catastrophe?

RG: There just might be Black people in your pool. These works are created (in part) from Ebony Magazine June 1967, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his family are found poolside recreating. We can only hope that Black people might end up in the pool, and at the pool party. Be warned—buoyancy will be required.

BC: What are you currently listening to, reading, and/or dreaming about (bonus points if it's related to flood)?

RG: Max Roach and Abby Lincoln / Freedom Now Suite.

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Elle Hong and Joshua Ware on HOW WE DO THINGS, 2025.

Black Cube: Tell us about the artwork you’re creating for flood.

Elle Hong + Joshua Ware: HOW WE DO THINGS is a durational performance work that explores and destabilizes the mundane. Through pedestrian movement—walking, sitting, drinking—this collaboration investigates the latent choreographies embedded in everyday life, making familiar gestures feel strange, and strange gestures feel familiar.

The performance begins in Matt Barton’s Community Forms installation with a quiet procession: a gradual accumulation of bodies in motion, meandering toward the pool. This ambulatory opening frames the artists as both participants and guides, setting a tone of slow transformation.

At the pool, the ideal scenario features a custom-fabricated 4’x10’ platform, built by Ware, suspended above the water’s surface. On this platform, Hong and Ware will navigate confined space with a series of abstract stools (also constructed by Ware), enacting repeated and sometimes uncomfortable negotiations of proximity, presence, and personal space. The limitations of the structure become generative—offering moments of stuckness, accidental intimacy, discomfort, and eventual attunement.

Ultimately, HOW WE DO THINGS is a practice in attention: an invitation to witness how people share space, time, and gesture when stripped of spectacle and left with only the bare rhythms of being-with.

BC: How does your forthcoming artwork engage with one or more facets of flood’s curatorial frame—of pool parties, of leisure, of environmental catastrophe?

EH + JW: Our work's beginning in Barton's Community Forms sees two bodies embodying water-like pathways, contrasted with the sharpness and angularity natural for bodies navigating terrain. Bodies crest, swirl, and eventually spread to fill the containers they're placed within, though always coming up against the boundaries of being/having a body. While there are moments of leisure embedded throughout the work, we've worked to create a sense of unfamiliarity through repetition, structuring, and removing things from their original or expected contexts, leading audiences to view the performers more as two individuals working to make sense/nonsense of the environment they've been plopped into.

Once our piece migrates towards the pool, the performers must navigate a limited amount of space with the added stakes of potential missteps leading to falling into the pool. Although risk is ever-present within this section, there's a sort of metaphor in the decision to cohabitate and act in communion/cooperation within the risk, that feels necessary in approaching how we must operate as the world around us changes. Although the environment around us, whether self-constructed or altered via forces beyond our control, poses potential danger, there is an optimism and tenderness within reliance on one another that feels necessary in translating towards how we operate both within/outside of performance.

BC: What are you currently listening to, reading, and/or dreaming about (bonus points if it's related to flood)?

EH: Reading: Justin Torres' Blackouts—a sort of historical nonfiction work that tells its narrative through interview, erasure poetry, photographs/illustrations, and historical documents from the 1941 report “Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns.” I’ve been really attached to how the hybrid form of storytelling present within the book contributes a certain type of memory recall that relies on fragmentation, and I feel that fragmentation offers a kind of self-determination that feels akin to folks who hold histories of migration or historical erasure. The two of us are working to create a sort of abstract throughline, whose narrative is ultimately constructed through audience interpretation. This feels resistant to hegemonic story structures (i.e., introduction-conflict-resolution) in our creating a new kind of fragmented memory. Listening: songs you would hear in American Apparel in the late 2000s, early 2010s. Dreaming: a raincoat that is actually waterproof, and zoning out near a body of water with friends.

JW: Reading: John Berryman’s The Dream Songs. Listening: The Knife’s Deep Cuts, Hamilton Leithauser’s This Side of the Island, & Nation of Language’s Strange Disciple. Dreaming: parallel lines meeting somewhere past the horizon, but remaining separate, apart.

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Julia Jamrozik and Coryn Kempster on Lifesavers, 2025.

Black Cube: Tell us about the artwork you’re creating for flood.

Julia Jamrozik + Coryn Kempster: Lifesavers is the latest iteration of our “Inflatable Culture” series which we installed first in Busan, South Korea in 2013 and then in Toronto, Canada in 2016. “Inflatable Culture” is always a giant mound of PVC inflatables, but for each new context we work with a different theme when selecting which inflatables to use. For Denver, we have chosen lifebuoys in response to the curatorial prompt: flood. We have conceived of Lifesavers as a social infrastructure and we hope people will play with the rings and interact with each other.

BC: How does your forthcoming artwork engage with one or more facets of flood’s curatorial frame—of pool parties, of leisure, of environmental catastrophe?

JJ + CK: We believe we were invited to produce an iteration of “Inflatable Culture” because the work embraces a double meaning by recalling the joy of pool parties and beach holidays while simultaneously critiquing our disposable culture of over-consumption and its effects on the environment. We chose to work with lifesavers in response to the curatorial prompt to evoke the dual connotations of both the childhood candy and the instrument for rescuing drowning victims. The translucent candy-coloured rings are playful and invite people to interact with the artwork and each other, while the emergency-coded rings speak to the many emergencies, both environmental and political, we are experiencing today as our leaders seek to “flood the zone.” We see Lifesavers as a gesture to our American neighbours—while we acknowledge the severity of the crises surrounding all of us we want to lend a hand, however futile, as we believe both in the power of humour and critical conversations as actions to fuel change.

BC: What are you currently listening to, reading, and/or dreaming about (bonus points if it's related to flood)?

JJ + CK: Come gather 'round people wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin'
And you better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'
– Bob Dylan

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Bradley Klem on the Ice Bags series, 2025.

Black Cube: Tell us about the artwork you’re creating for flood.

Bradley Klem: This series began with a chance encounter at the grocery store, where I noticed cartoon polar bears lounging on melting icebergs printed on plastic ice bags. The irony was striking.

Recast in porcelain and decorated with china paint, these sculptural vessels mimic the ephemeral plastic originals, while fossilizing their contradictions. On one side, cheerful mascots sip drinks on shrinking ice. On the other, their skeletal remains mirror the consequences of our collective denial.

In many ways, commercial ice bags function as ready-mades, ironic, meme-like artifacts of climate commentary, printed on petroleum products and sold without a hint of self-awareness. As with much of my work, these objects use the language of the vessel to expose the dissonance between beauty, consumption, and environmental collapse. They ask: what will we preserve, and at what cost?

BC: How does your forthcoming artwork engage with one or more facets of flood’s curatorial frame—of pool parties, of leisure, of environmental catastrophe?

BK: My Ice Bag series engages with flood’s curatorial frame by collapsing the aesthetics of leisure and catastrophe into a single object. These porcelain sculptures replicate disposable ice bags, icons of pool parties and summertime excess, while confronting the environmental consequences hidden beneath their surface. The imagery of cartoon animals relaxing on melting ice is both absurd and tragically fitting: a meme-like gesture toward climate collapse, mass-produced on petroleum-based plastic. By fossilizing these objects in porcelain, I aim to preserve that tension, asking what it means to celebrate comfort and consumption as the world heats up around us.

BC: What are you currently listening to, reading, and/or dreaming about (bonus points if it's related to flood)?

BK: I recently finished "Braiding Sweetgrass" by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which offers a gentle grounding lens on reciprocity and care that feels worlds away when I look out my studio window, where the Suncor oil refinery flame burns night and day. I’m listening to engines idling, to melting in the distance, to the long, low hum of extraction. Lately, dreaming feels like treading water in a culture soaked with excess. I keep imagining future archaeologists digging up ceramic ice bags and trying to piece together whether we drowned ourselves or danced through the flood.