Artists’ Talk: Thursday, November 5, 2009, 7 PM

Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen will fill the Dumbo Arts Center with their enormous site-specific installation The Experience of Green. Opening September 25, 2009, the exhibition will emphasize the contrast between the organic and the built environment. Viewers will step out of Dumbo’s stark brick-and-glass commercial district into a fantastical forest; a walk-through labyrinth of old growth trees made entirely from red kraft paper. The spectacular network of gnarled tree trunks and twisted roots will extend over every inch of the gallery, suspending the boundaries of space and time while fully immersing the viewer.

The Experience of Green is Kavanaugh and Nguyen’s most ambitious work to date as well as the artists’ first major debut in NYC of their ongoing collaborative series of visually phenomenal, meticulously crafted paper installations. Here, the staggering volume of paper that the artists stack, splice, layer and coil will be in a brilliant crimson, burning an impression in the viewers’ mind. The Experience of Green may come most clearly into focus only after viewers exit the gallery, the color persisting as an optical after-image, accentuating the relationship between experience and memory, landscape and longing, nature and the sublime.

The Experience of Green, a full-color catalog with essay by Jen Schwarting will be published by DAC in December, 2009.