“Swoon” was a name created by an artist of the name Caledonia Dance Curry. She was born in Connecticut, but raised in Florida. She was only 19 When she moved to Borough Park, Brooklyn to study painting at Prat institute. Curry is mostly known for her Street art, but she also does printmaking as well as painting.
Curry created the name Swoon because of a dream her boyfriend had about the two of them doing graffiti and running from the cops. She adopted the name and began tagging her work as ‘Swoon’ instead of leaving it anonymous, which she previously had done with most of her street art. What is unique about this name, is that it is gender neutral. With the combination of street art and a gender neutral name, people automatically assumed that this artist was a man. People were looking for the “Swoon – guy” to come make art for shows or in specific parts of town. Street art is often seen as something for men, and too dangerous for women. Swoon was able to successfully produce work in an area that is usually unwelcoming to woman. She also carries the advantage while out pasting her work because she is a woman. Police do not suspect a woman to be a part of the street art like they do men. Therefore it is much easier for her to be producing and pasting street art more frequently then men do.
Swoon’s figurative pieces are all of her friends and family, or various people that she has met in one of the many places she has traveled to in her career. She is constantly telling a story of the people she has met throughout her life, through her work. She tires to pull different elements of a person out into one single image. Whether that be a gesture, a characteristic or a specific story or memory of that person. Her work is also about connectedness. This includes connections between people and life, her and specific people, or even structures and compositions with the people involved.
Curry’s street art includes a lot of printmaking in combination with cut paper and paint. She uses a wheat paste to attach it to inhabitable places. These places include walls of abandoned buildings, bridges, fire escape, water towers and street signs. Her imagery always incorporates the figures of friends and family members. Because her work includes printmaking processes, she is able to use her imagery more than once, this is called an edition. Curry turned the traditional form of editioning into something more contemporary called an EV, or edition variant. This means that she prints the image a certain amount of times, but alters each one with paint, drawing or cut paper. The Images below show how she uses her prints in such different ways, on the street and in a gallery setting.
This connectedness that swoon talks about in several different interviews, and successfully portrays in her works, is pushed even further into structures. She has traveled around the world, one of the places she has been to is Haiti, to build structures with the local people as a collaboration. These structures help create, not only a connection between the people in the community, but with the community and the environment around them. Swoon also continues this idea in relation to disconnectedness with boats.
In 2009, Swoon was a part of the Swimming Cities of Serenissima. She and a group of about thirty people crashed the Venice Biennial with ‘Swimming cities’. Swoon did many experimental runs in the US along the Hudson and Mississippi River of rafts made of junk from New York City. Several vessels would float together as a fleet down these bodies of water, stopping at various locations to perform and collect more things to add to their structures. They actually lived on these vessels for weeks. The US Swimming Cities projects were only experiments for the Swimming Cities of Serenissima in Venice. These experiments took place down the Hudson river. Part of rafts from NYC were actually shipped to Venice and added to, as well as brand new ones built while in Venice. Each boat used a recycled motors from old cars and the materials were salvaged or given to them.
Swoon’s website: http://caledoniacurry.com/
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.