Art Meets Ecology

We can’t think of many artists who can overrun an environment like kudzu. But since 2005, the New York-based conceptual team of Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen has been creating mind-boggling works that swarm over spaces from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, transporting viewers into fantastic visions...

By Carlos Suarez De Jesus

March 14, 2013

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We can’t think of many artists who can overrun an environment like kudzu. But since 2005, the New York-based conceptual team of Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen has been creating mind-boggling works that swarm over spaces from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, transporting viewers into fantastic visions of primeval nature. This Saturday at Locust Projects (3852 N. Miami Ave., Miami), you can find yourself carried into a surreal wilderness through their sensory-jarring depiction of South Florida’s ecological grandeur. Employing little more than thousands of sheets of craft paper, Kavanaugh and Nguyen created a massive rendition of our fragile ecosystem in an immersive, site-specific installation based on their impressions of the Everglades. The collaborative duo’s space-engulfing opus, “Drawn From the Everglades,” delivers an abstract version of gnarled mangroves, undulating sawgrass, and even some menacing storm clouds roiling on the horizon. Their soaring installation was inspired by a monthlong residency at Everglades National Park this past February.
March 16-April 26, 2013

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