Nadia Ahmed & Alyson Provax
Spring / Break NY
September 23-28, 2026
Nadia Ahmed and Alyson Provax represent The Vestibule at the artist-driven Spring / Break NY fair! Their collaborative installation, The Message Remains, draws together sculpture, letterpress and installation that reference text, communication and intimacy. To understand that a person hides behind words – this is the first game of language, one played by Ahmed and Provax. In wax, wire and string, Ahmed writes messages to and from her family; Provax uses and misuses letterpress to iterate messages from the interior self.
Artist Biographies
Alyson Provax (she/her) is a text based artist. Her primary medium is letterpress and she often uses repetition as a drawing tool rather than to make multiple originals. This calls into question the didactic certainty of text and can cause the viewer to notice the experience of reading. She is interested in the ways that we communicate things we are a bit uncertain of and how we tie our understanding of ourselves to language.
Nadia Ahmed (she/her) is a Pakistani-American artist and arts administrator currently based in Seattle, WA. She moved from Los Angeles to Seattle in 2014, where she studied Art History and Three-Dimensional Forum at the University of Washington. Nadia’s exhibition history includes Mini Mart City Park, SOIL Gallery, The Vestibule, and Hedreen Gallery. She has been an artist in residence at Nii Modo and Inscape Arts, and is currently a resident artist at Actualize in Pioneer Square, Seattle. With a focus on community building and racial equity, Nadia has worked at multiple Seattle nonprofits and arts-based organizations. She is currently working as Communications Specialist at the City of Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture.
Nadia’s practice explores how we process grief, deal with generational trauma, and express connection. She uses her artwork to document and investigate her family’s history and question what’s passed down through time. She is drawn to the use of familiar materials, like beeswax, text, and hair, questioning how the value of something changes depending on where or how it exists. Her work investigates the human relationship to time, examining the failure, pain, and distortion of memory. Something valuable that Nadia gets from her own work is a chance to connect with people in an exposed and intimate way.
How and Why
For art fairs, the artists of The Vestibule drive the project; they design the installation and staff the booth. All commissions return to the artist and to programming. Fairs offer artists career development in a new city and expose the global community to Pacific Northwest Art.
Preview this exhibition and see available works (coming soon)