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Winthrop native and Brooklyn-based artist Wade Kavanaugh creates sculptures that scale walls, circle spaces and reflect a new method of thinking about space and motion. He offered portfolio critiques and spoke at UMaine this Tuesday as part of the Student Art League’s new guest lecture series.
His work employs the use of various materials that seem like maps or storm clouds. But the sculptures themselves start from shapes derived from Kavanaugh’s movements, which he photographs and then traces. He presented some slides of the process, photographs with red lines tracing the arc of his arm, or the lift and descent of his foot while running.
“Movement is a form of thinking,” he told the audience gathered in Barrows Hall. Explaining how he began thinking of his ideas of tracking motion while working on a sculpture, he said he came up with the notion that his own movements were creating the pieces, and discovered that movement was a way of defining the space a person occupies.
“People underestimate the ways they perceive the world,” he said. While we all consider touch, smell and sound as senses that contribute to our understanding of our surroundings,” Kavanaugh “People underestimate the role of movements in creating that perception.” To emphasize this, Kavanaugh had the audience walk in his footprints, which he marked on the ground with tape prior to the lecture. In this way, the audience got a sense of what it meant to move in a space where so many movements were possible. The members of the audience were following one another, but also taking up space that had been occupied by another body beforehand.
Scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology recently made the startling announcement that they had managed to get six atoms to spin in opposite directions at the same time. What’s more, they’ve reproduced these results thousands of times. The mind can’t possibly fathom such a strange concept as existing in multiple places simultaneously, but Wade Kavanaugh’s work shows us the infinite possibilities of our motions and choices in a way that we can better comprehend. This is the principle at play in Kavanaugh’s work, the various forms and paths that our motions can take.
Nathan Stevens of The Student Art League says they are planning future guest lectures, but started with Kavanaugh because he has Maine roots and is making it as a successful artist outside the state. “This is extremely important, to show the students here that it is possible to be an artist, that this is a realistic goal. Wade sets a great example of the feasibility of working as a practicing artist outside of the academic setting,” he said.
You can see some of Wade Kavanaugh’s earlier work on his Web site, www.wadeka vanaugh.com.
