McClain Gallery is proud to announce our second solo exhibition with artists Nick Vaughan & Jake Margolin: Around the corner and two blocks down. The show features a group of new drawings depicting fragments of architecture and details of sites throughout Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas that formerly housed queer spaces. Nick and Jake will present a public performance-lecture about this body of work at the gallery the evening of February 11, 2026.

Nick and Jake make beautifully material work that spans media to reveal queer histories from all 50 states. In their ongoing series of wind drawings, the artists have developed a technique that uses dispersal in order to engrain charcoal into paper. They translate photographs into laser cut stencils and lay down charcoal powder onto the page. Then, they blow the charcoal away using pressurized air. The force of the wind drags the charcoal particulates across the tooth of the paper, etching the final image onto the page. Nick and Jake’s drawings teem with symbolic gestures: charcoal recalls the ruinous potential of fire on wood and paper; wind evokes erosion and objects lost to time and space; paper is the historical material for the official record, fraught with sensitivity to the elements.

Each drawing is titled with the location’s prior life as a queer space. The places, former gay and lesbian bars, drag stages, or cruising grounds, are memorialized through their naming and pictorial effigy. Nick and Jake undertake a complex maneuver with these ethereal and ghostly images: the drawings act as document, record, and monument for spaces no longer living. In Terrace Lounge/Bon Sai (Topeka, Kansas), a door with a pediment towers at almost 8 feet, appearing wind-blown. Kansan bar attendees might remember this entrance and the former space’s successive names, but the image obscures this convivial past. The whole story is just beyond grasp, behind an impenetrable portal. But as the title of the exhibition suggests, all one might need to do to gain passage is to ask for directions.

Through their work, Nick and Jake reveal and protect sensitive histories via careful retelling. Stewarded by queer people, these lost spaces’ stories are recorded and made available to others seeking them. The current political and social moment in the United States provides a galvanizing backdrop to this particular conversation, with the proliferation of AI fakes and campaigns of misinformation (and outright lies). Examining history and its mechanisms, the way it is recorded and kept hidden, raises questions of how oppressed heritage can endure despite those pressures. Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin highlight the necessity of maintaining shared memory with lyricism, delicacy, and wit.