SWOON, papers on walls

I don't know if Swoon is "the best", but she is definitely very good. Her works are really outstanding. Her technique is also that of posters, but her works breathe and sweat the idea of temporariness in an exceptional way. Her posters, drawn or printed, are always different.

Even the reprinted ones are only frames on which Swoon redraws and recreates her metalinguistic discourse.

It is a discourse that is not finished in the drawing only, but is complemented with cuttings and fretwork on the paper -Swoon had worked in sculpture years before- a technique that accentuates its deterioration out in the open, a deterioration that the artist herself photographs again in an attempt to freeze the shadows which are being produced.

SWOON is a street artist from New York City who specializes in life-size wheatpaste prints and paper cutouts of figures. Swoon, real name Caledonia “Callie” Dance Curry, studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and started doing street art around 1999. Swoon is also a member of the Justseeds Artist Cooperative.

One of the most deep-seated marks of identity is that of "temporariness" the recognition of its being and ephemeral form of expresion.

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More information

Caledonia “Callie” Dance Curry SWOON

Caledonia Dance Curry, aka Swoon, was born in 1978 in Connecticut USA, but grew up in Florida in a world of marshes and fishermen. In 1999 began his career as a street artist. At 19 she moved to New York and studied painting and printmaking at the Pratt Institute. In 2002 he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute, New York. She won the 2002 Scholarship Evolutionaere Zellen, in 2007 Lambent Fellowship, Tides Foundation. Lives and works in New York, NY.

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.

Swoon is a founding member of the art collective the Miss Rockaway Armada 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 Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea. 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. In the same year, Swoon was featured in Chiara Clemente's documentary "Our City Dreams".

Swoon and a crew of 30 crashed the 2009 Venice Biennale with "The Clutchess of Cuckoo," a performance project similar to the Miss Rockaway Armada and the Swimming Cities of the Switchback Sea that sailed from Slovenia in boats made of New York City garbage, stopping at various points on the way to Certosa Island. They "barnstormed" the Grand Canal at 3:00 a.m.

Swoon pasted up works on various North Philadelphia buildings as part of Philagrafika 2010.