Wade Kavanaugh and Steven Nguyen started their latest collaboration with solo walkabouts. Each artist walked his own 40-mile loop through the Hoh Rain Forest.* Then, they came back together and set to work, and what they made together is a storm of twisted black paper.

You enter Suyama Space and this storm appears immediately like a gothic fantasy, first glimpsed through the narrow entranceway at the end of the ramp leading from the door to the gallery. Right away, you want to get close; the surface is so detailed. Some of its knotty ropes and coils are messy like morning hair. Some are pretty: charred roses.

You're drawn to walk around, and keep going, because the eye wants more of these surfaces, until finally, you are on the other side from where you entered, and beckoned by a sudden little path to enter the eye of the storm, where its tallest whipped peaks rise up. Inside, it's a black grotto. Grim, pointy towers jolt up above you. Basically, you're a child in a Grimm fairytale.

The spell of the Hoh is something else, unnervingly dense and wild even to locals, but especially to outsiders. Kavanaugh and Nguyen live in Brooklyn. Each time they've made art in Seattle, it has had to do with our landscape: once very specifically, in reproducing the Denny Regrade in the gallery (the Regrade being a local phenomenon nearly as unnerving as the wilderness of the rain forest), and another time, orchestrating a great flock of white birds crashing through a black wall in the aftermath of the BP oil spill off the coast of Florida in 2010.

Their current installation, Drawn from the Olympics, is tangled, romantic, operatic, and inevitable. Its subject is not human, like the oil spill or regrade were, but its towering indifference feels personal, especially given the private little tunnel—and especially if you see the installation at night, when it's dark out and there's no light in the gallery and the only light you get is either the midnight blue of the night outside or the yellowy light of the adjacent architecture offices.

I haven't seen the installation during the day, and I'm not sure I want to. I prefer to feel that I only half-saw it, in the half-light, and that there are things hidden there that I'm just as well not having to face.

But here it is, in a professional installation shot taken at the height of light. This to me looks like the morning after a fire.

All the details are on Suyama Space's web site.

^{*Let me remind you, although you probably don't need reminding, that the artists who live and work in this region use the landscape the way artists from other places use drugs or women. In another example of two artists collaborating on work inspired by time in the Hoh rain forest, here's a review of Anne Mathern and Chad Wentzel's 2008 post-walkabout show at Crawl Space. That show, called This is the Worst Trip, was terrific.}