Now celebrating its 15th year of exhibiting experimental contemporary art, Locust Projects is pleased to present a site-specific installation by the New York-based collaborative duo Wade Kavanaugh & Stephen B. Nguyen. Known for undulating installations of twisted and gnarled paper that engulf spaces and surround the viewer, Kavanaugh and Nguyen will create an immersive three-dimensional drawing based on their impressions of the Everglades, where they were artists in residence in February with the AIRIE program. Their practice focuses on the collaborative process itself, resulting in abstractions of the entangled mangrove roots, waving sawgrass, and muscular storm clouds of the Everglades waterscape.

Kavanaugh and Nguyen have collaborated since 2005. The artists regard the collaborative process as a platform to articulate the collective processing of what they see, and probe the visual foundations of perception and imagination. The resulting work is a conflation of the two artists’ perception of the same phenomena.

About the artists
Wade Kavanaugh was born in Portland, ME and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his AB in Economics from Bowdoin College in 2001. Stephen B. Nguyen was born in Little Falls, MN and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. In 2002 he received his MFA in painting from the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Kavanaugh and Nguyen’s collaborative work has been exhibited at Mass MoCA in North Adams, MA; The Dumbo Arts Center and Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY; the Soap Factory in Minneapolis, MN; and The Maproom in Portland, ME among others. Both artists individually have been awarded grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts and have been fellows at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH.

Locust Projects’ exhibitions and programming are made possible with the support from: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Galt & Skye Mikesell; Hannibal Cox Jr. Foundation; John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Mayor, and the Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners. Special thanks: Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York.