ArtSeen
Swoon: Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea
Deitch Studios, Long Island City, September 7 – October 19, 2008
Swoon—a street artist whose moniker shields her from potential prosecution on vandalism charges—sailed her ragtag Burning Man on the Hudson-like flotilla of seven sculptures nee boats to landfall in front of a cheering crowd of hipsters on the docks of Deitch Projects in Long Island City. An oom-pah marching band and the toot-toot of a whistle from a biodiesel motor announced the arrival of her patchwork vessels, little engines that could stocked by a crew of latter-day Merry Pranksters. A five-month endeavor, the flotilla was made of scraps from junk heaps and various dumpster-diving forays. It started its journey from Troy, New York, making three weeks of pit stops along the way to produce musical and theatrical performances.
">
The second part of Swoon’s work was a huge installation inside Deitch Studios. Constructed in two sections, above and below an imaginary flood line that presciently predicted Hurricane Ike in Texas, it culminates in a vision of a city rising above the sea. The work is strewn with a sensation of sea wreck and seaweed. Everywhere there are hemp ropes, ripped cords, and torn bits of draped, lacey fabric. The colors, muted and faded, bleached and forgotten, merges into her signature portrait cutouts of ordinary people block-printed on wheat-pasted paper.
Swoon’s earlier pieces were slapped onto out-of-the-way or abandoned buildings of New York, where the weather would tear and ravage them into time-based scraps of memory. Her technique as a woodblock printer, which she calls “paper cutting carving,” is influenced by German Expressionism, Indonesian shadow puppets and Gordon Matta-Clark. The idea of a picture on a wall is way too confining; instead, the city becomes her canvas, and in the case of the flotilla, the trajectory of the Hudson River serves as a calligraphic path. Swoon has said that she feels the need to tell the stories of ordinary people and that she wants to serve as a megaphone for those stories. This time she decided to include earth and nature as her mute companions, asking the whole world to wake up to an impending cataclysm.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
60. (Pier 34, Hudson River)
By Raphael RubinsteinJUNE 2021 | The Miraculous
One day a man in his late 20s who has still not “found himself” in the world hears about some unusual activities on an abandoned Hudson River pier a few blocks from his home. Apparently artists have been sneaking into the vast decaying structure and filling it with unauthorized murals and sculptures. Curious, and a little nervous (trespassing is a crime, after all, and in early 1980s New York wandering around an abandoned pier is not a particularly safe thing to do), he finds himself one afternoon stepping through a broken-into entryway and penetrating into a vast decrepit domain.
68. (60 Hudson Street, Tribeca)
By Raphael RubinsteinSEPT 2021 | The Miraculous
As the third wave of a deadly pandemic crashes through the nation, a painter sets up a storefront studio in a landmarked Lower Manhattan building that has served as a communications hub for nearly a century. Surrounded by stacks of folded cloth, she is visible through the window to passersby as she works with a pair of scissors and a sewing machine, cutting up and stitching together fragments of curtains, bedsheets, dish towels, women’s suits, embroidered tablecloths, brocade upholstery, scarves, men’s long sleeve shirts, knitted blankets and countless other remnants from the realm of everyday textiles.
75. (Pier 18, Hudson River)
By Raphael RubinsteinOCT 2021 | The Miraculous
An artist and her friend are helping install an exhibition of experimental works on an abandoned Lower West Side pier. The women involved in the show are working hard, but the artists whose projects are being shown are all men. It’s the early 1970s. Walking home at night through the empty streets of Downtown Manhattan the two friends feel safer making loud noises, singing off-key and generally pretending to be crazy. One night they find themselves improvising bird sounds based on the first name of the organizer of the exhibition. This impromptu performance develops into a sound piece titled Birdcalls where the artist utters the surnames of 28 male artists in a variety of bird-like noises.
The Big Fake Gentrification on the Hudson Public Art or Public Fart
By Ama BirchJUNE 2021 | Poetry
Ama Birch was born on the Lower East Side during a blizzard.
