DABSMYLA presents Garden Party
*Galleries have limited capacity. There will be a one in/one out system in place. Guests are asked to keep their time in the exhibition to 45 minutes or less. An RSVP does not guarantee entry or preferential entry.
More about DABSMYLA presents Garden Party
About the Exhibition
Transforming LBMA Downtown into a fully immersive and interactive world, DABSMYLA's forthcoming exhibition, Garden Party, brings together paintings, ceramics, textile design, murals, animation, projection mapping, and an original soundscape.
At its heart, Garden Party is a celebration of friendship, creativity, and connection.
Garden Party at LBMA Downtown, opening on Saturday, November 14.
This exhibition is made possible with generous support from Adobe and RVCA Artist Network Program
About the Artists
Australian-born, LA-based artists Darren Mate and Emmelene Mate, known collectively as DABSMYLA, have been creating art together since the mid-2000s, building a vivid, ever-expanding universe where color, imagination, and the everyday collide. The married couple met in Melbourne, where they began their creative partnership, before relocating to Los Angeles in 2009. What began with painting and murals has since evolved into a multidisciplinary practice encompassing drawing, sculpture, design, and immersive installations that transform entire spaces into works of art.
At the heart of DABSMYLA's practice is a creative relationship that defies conventional divisions of authorship. Working together on every aspect of their projects, the couple have developed an almost telepathic understanding of one another's instincts, often communicating without words as ideas take shape. Their process is intuitive, spontaneous, and, by their own account, a little magical. Each work emerges from an ongoing conversation between two artists whose personal and creative lives have become inseparable.
Their shared visual language draws on the rich tapestry of their experiences together. Travel, nature, architecture, music, personal memories, and the small pleasures of everyday life become the raw materials for a world of exuberant color and unexpected connections. Familiar objects take on new personalities, landscapes unfold into imagined territories, and recurring motifs create a sense of continuity between individual works. Their saturated palettes and playful compositions evoke the visual pleasures of animation, illustration, and popular culture, creating an aesthetic that feels at once nostalgic and entirely contemporary.
Over the years, this interest in creating interconnected worlds has led DABSMYLA beyond the canvas and into the realm of immersive installation. Paintings, sculptural objects, furniture, sound, animation, and architecture become elements of a single composition, transforming galleries and other spaces into environments that can be physically explored. These imaginative worlds occupy a curious territory between art and life, inviting audiences to rediscover the familiar through a more playful, unexpected lens.
More than twenty years after their first collaboration in Melbourne, DABSMYLA continue to explore the possibilities of making art. Together, they have built a universe entirely their own, a world where the ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary.