The room is dark, electronic music thrums and laser light beams hang in the air. The scene might sound familiar, but Lightfall, the latest offering from Miami’s Superblue, is taking experiential art to new places, projecting its ever-shifting animation onto a high-tech curtain made from a fine mist of gently falling water droplets.

“This is a work challenging perception through light and color,” Margot Mottaz, Superblue’s head of curatorial, told me. “It’s very simple. It’s just water and light, but the artists have made it really sublime and really beautiful.”

The piece is the work of Studio Lemercier, co-directed by Joanie Lemercier and independent curator Juliette Bibasse, and features a custom sound piece by electronic musician Murcof. The French duo has spent 15 years working on light projections, but this is only the second time they’ve brought water into the mix.

“The hard part of making this water curtain surface was making a mist that was invisible when there was no light on it,” Bibasse told me.

Studio Lemercier, Lightfall, 2024. Photo courtesy of Superblue, ©Mind the Film.

Lightfall is a commission from Superblue, and has been 18 months in the making. It fills a room that was once used for the line to enter the Allapattah institution’s James Turrell “Ganzfeld” installation, titled AKHU. Now, guests must make timed reservations to experience that work, freeing up valuable real estate for Studio Lemercier’s new installation.

“We don’t really want to take artworks out to put new ones in, so it’s about finding creative ways to transform the space,” Mottaz said. “It’s getting more challenging—we are bursting at the seams!”

Studio Lemercier, Lightfall, 2024. Photo courtesy of Superblue, ©Mind the Film.

To install Lightfall, the gallery had to be rebuilt from scratch, with a special drainage system in the floor. (The tiny droplets are so fine that there is very little water consumption, and there are sensors that turn off the mist whenever there aren’t visitors in the space.)

The laser lights play on a roughly 15-minute loop that changes slightly each time, with panes and rings of light seemingly solidifying in mid air as the beams hit the water screen.

Studio Lemercier, Lightfall, 2024. Photo courtesy of Superblue, ©Studio Lemercier.

The artists hope that viewers will not just view the piece from the entrance, but will walk through the room, passing into the mist for a unique take on the idea of an immersive experience. It’s a strangely compelling sensation, your body temperature dropping as you enter the water curtain, lights flashing above you.

“It’s nice to walk around and see it from the side,” Bibasse said. “You have a physical moment with the water.”