Swoon (artist)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SWOON is a street artist from New York City who specializes in life-size wheatpaste prints and paper cutouts of figures. Swoon studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and started doing street art around 1999. Swoon does not release her real name to the public to avoid prosecution for vandalism.
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[edit] Life
Swoon's worlds are often populated by realistically rendered cut-out street people, often her friends and family. Riding bikes, talking on a stoop, going grocery shopping - these people traverse a cityscape of her own unique invention. Bridges, fire escapes, water towers and street signs create crisscrossing shadows and spaces through which her figures move. Inspired by both art historical and folk sources, ranging from German Expressionist wood block prints to Indonesian shadow puppets, Swoon uses cut paper to play with positive and negative space in a conceptually driven exploration of the experience of the streets.
Swoon's exhibitions and workshops in the United States and Europe have included collaborations with the art collectives, Glowlab, Black Label, Change Agent, the Madagascar Institute and the Barnstormers. Her work was included in P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center’s Greater New York 2005, and appeared in Deitch Projects’ special design district space art Art Basel Miami 2005 and at MOMA and the Brooklyn Museum in 2006. In 2007 the Hui No'eau on Maui hosted Swoon under their visiting artist program wing of their internationally acclaimed Hui Press print studios. For two weeks she taught and collaborated with gifted Maui children in the creation of woodblock prints which they installed in the Hui No'eau gallery. [1]
Swoon is a founding member of the art collective the Miss Rockaway Armada [2] a group which built large rafts out of salvaged materials and floated them down the Mississippi River in 2006 and 2007. In the summer of 2008 she presented a two-part exhibition with Deitch Projects called [3] Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea. It was a large installation inside the Deitch Studios space as well as a journey of seven handmade sculptural wooden rafts from Troy, NY down the Hudson River and up the East River in New York City to the Deitch Studios gallery.
A project similar to the Miss Rockaway Armada and the Swimming Cities of the Switchback Sea, discussed in detail on Swoon's website blog, is slated to crash the 2009 Venice Biennial.
[edit] Notes
[edit] Further reading
- [2]
- NY Times Article
- NY Times article
- The Morning News interview
- Sadie Magazine interview
- Gammablog interview
- KultureFlash interview
- Rising Artist on Curbs and Stoops
- Graffiti World, Thames & Hudson, 2004, ISBN 0-500-51170-5
- Street Logos, Tristan Manco, Thames & Hudson, 2004, ISBN 0-500-28469-5
[edit] Video Interview
- video about Swoon's project Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea at Deitch Projects, New York. 2008
- interview with Swoon about the Portrat of Silvia Elena at Honey Space, New York
- interview with Swoon
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