A Giant Pink Sea Slug Turns Toxicity into Play

The creature looks strange at first—its pink felt body stretches across the exhibition like a soft form from a fever dream. Although initially daunting, I take a seat on its back area and grip the rope; the creature begins to move back and forth. The room stays quiet but the mood changes as soon as the experience starts. This is Toxic Beauty: Okenia Rosacea Nudibranch at Cannonball Arts.

Cannonball Arts has an open layout. The bare walls, concrete floors, and expansive area makes the space feel easy to move through. There is no pressure to stay quiet or act formal. Visitors drift from piece to piece, as if they are swimming under the sea. The gallery gives room for curiosity without judgment through contemporary art.

Artist Stephanie Metz built the piece as a large-scale model of the Hopkins Rose nudibranch, a pink sea slug that grows to half an inch in the wild. Metz upscaled it to ten feet wide. She shaped it with felted wool and installed it over a mechanical bull rig in the center of a padded ring. The work invites contact. It encourages visitors to climb on and ride it. As the ride starts, immediate child-like joy fills the big, empty space.

The striking color covers the entire body like a warning flag. Fingerlike appendages line its back. When the rig starts the nudibranch tilts, spins, and bucks in slow patterns. Participants climb on, hold tight, and have fun. I felt it move smoothly like in a wave-like motion. Perhaps that was a hidden metaphor to the hidden meaning of waves rising from global warming. The piece is an animal and a machine at the same time. It works as a ride and as an artwork. 

The vibe and atmosphere of Cannonball Arts removes the staunchness and distances of traditional museums through loose and open energy which supports the piece and fulfills its purpose as an interactive artwork.

Metz blends craft and mechanics in this creature. The worn surface gives the creature a handmade look—and the bull rig supplies mechanical force and motion. These two aspects come together to add life and cohesion to this piece, which only felt natural to its character and the ocean theme of the exhibition.

In the wild, the Hopkins Rose nudibranch gets its vibrant color and toxins from the bryozoans it eats. Metz uses this detail to show how a creature reflects the place it lives in. As the ocean warms, this species moves farther north, which hints at changes happening in the water.

The formal elements stay simple, allowing viewers to focus on the concept without confusion. Metz does not hide her process or her intention. Everything works in service of the same idea: to take something small and overlooked, enlarge it, and let people meet it face-to-face. The nudibranch is both predator and prey, but its toxins are poisonous to creatures that eat it, giving it a fearsome reputation in the ocean world; its color warns others away in the wild. By modeling this immersive exhibition around a creature that is so toxic in the real world, Metz turns what is typically imposing or threatening in the wild into an approachable piece of entertainment. Metz shifts viewers’ first reaction to the nudibranch from instinctive fear to joy by reframing this typically toxic creature as a playful exhibition experience. Instead of being turned away from the vivacious color, people are more drawn to it because of the joy they experience on the ride. Through this, she suggests how these feelings are often shaped by context, presentation, and learned responses rather than by the subject itself.

Toxic Beauty works because it makes its point in a clear way. It does not rely on long explanations. The ride pulls people in, and the size and bright color keep their attention. The artist, Metz, uses basic choices to highlight a creature people never think about. Some may say the ride distracts from the message, but it actually helps. It makes a tiny sea slug impossible to ignore. 

Lead photo courtesy of Cannonball Arts.

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