Gallery Diet - that bright outpost of “contemporary art” docked in Miami—is being overrun by pirates in an affectionately hostile take-over: a new name, a new direction, and a new flag will be raised for three months: Night Tide.

For May, June and July Gallery Diet will be gone, washed away in the Night Tide as writer and curator Jarrett Earnest brings artworks, events, and texts together in a new sensibility - apocalyptic frivolity, Anthropocene Rococo.

Night Tide is feeling - densely layered - lapping wave upon wave - an atmospheric film set with attentive objects by: Nancy Goldring, Elizabeth Jaeger, Prajakti Jayavant, Sam McKinniss, Leigha Mason, Nathlie Provosty, Gaby Collins-Fernandez, Nicole Wittenberg, Ann Liv Young and Christy Gast.

Night Tide I opens May 17th 6-9pm Night Tide II opens June 21st 6-9pm

Questions, from Miami to Jarrett Earnest, on the announcement of Night Tide:

Why are you coming to Miami?

I believe adventures are vital to living, and that adventurous living is vital to making or talking about art. Escaping New York City for Miami to overtake a gallery and talk about mermaids is an adventure I can’t resist. Most people in the art world only know Miami during the fairs, but I had the good luck last June to spend time with the artists, writers and collectors who actually live there. I adored everyone: their spirit, the vigor of their conversations, the excitement of their ideas, and I wanted to experience that more deeply while introducing them to some of my favorite young New York artists.

Will you love us and leave us?

Right now I have a crush on Miami. Sometimes crushes turn into long-term romances, and sometimes they are brief summer flings—you don’t know what will happen until you are living it. Either way they create unexpected connections and leave residual pathways of affection.

Is there a sexy tone to this project?

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge once told me: “If sensuality and sexuality are parts of the learning of wisdom, which we believe they have to be, and can be a functional form of the deconstruction and reconstruction of perceptions of reality, then they should be approached as an incredibly divine, potent, and essential aspect of our lives.” I agree with Genesis, and so I see the erotic is a vital tool for making and understanding works of art. In one way Night Tide is an experiment to see if such a space of “divine working” can be created in a gallery context.

Who are you?

Because our consciousness is like a small boat on the vast sea of our unconscious there are profound parts of ourselves we cannot know, making a simple answer to “who am I” impossible. More straightforwardly there are parts of our bodies we feel but cannot see directly—only visually accessible with the mediation of mirror, image, or report. Does that mean you don’t “know” your own ass hole? How do you make that lived “sensation of knowing” into an image? Night Tide is about visual art that addresses itself to those enigmatic forces and other ways of knowing.

However, if the question is “by what authority am I taking over a gallery/bringing together a series of objects/and asking people to come see it?” Then the string of validating credentials are as follows: I am an artist who is part of the collaborative 1:1, which took the form of a lower east side gallery in New York for a year. I write about art and have published unorthodox long-form interviews with many artists including Paul McCarthy, Richard Tuttle, Chris Burden, Roni Horn, Maurizio Cattelan, and Christo, among many others. I teach a hybrid seminar/lecture/reading group at an experimental free art school in the East Village, the BHQFU. (BHQFU.org)