Swoon 🇺🇸 Contemporary Art • Street Art • Art For Sale, by BlackRatPress on Oct 3, 2007 22:07:01 GMT 1, Black Rat Gallery

So the time has come for us to move on. For the last eight months we’ve basically been holed-up in the dark cramped set of the Ladykillers. Every three minutes our teacups rattle in their saucers as trains thunder overhead, causing the old grandfather clock’s minute hand to rest flaccidly at six, while Alec Guiness pretends to play violin in the corner. But no more. Foiled in our attempts to set up an art empire in Battersea by a little old lady and the fact that no one wants an art empire in Battersea, we are moving east. Called by the siren song of blonde beers, aviator shades, too-skinny jeans and those really terrible looking jumpsuit-type outfits all the girls are wearing for no discernible reason we are decamping to a beautiful 2000 square foot gallery in Shoreditch. We’d say gleaming but that would be a lie. It’s almost entirely brick.

The exact location will be announced in a couple of weeks when we’ve settled in. That way you’ll know where to come for the first show.

The First Show: Heap

Our first show HEAP is going to be an absolute corker. It’s an installation show by Swoon, David Ellis and Monica Canilao. They’re going to be camped out in the gallery for two weeks prior to the show creating art to fit the space. (NB. If anyone from Fire & Safety is reading this it’s okay, we’ve told them no open fires.) (NB. If anyone from Swoon, David Ellis and Monica Canilao is reading this, don’t worry, we lied to Fire & Saftey, you can have all the open fires you want. No, we’re kidding. You’re not camping at all. We’ve got you a very nice apartment just off Old Street. It has beds and everything. Well, it has beds.)

So but anyway, we’re really genuinely excited about this, we’ve been huge fans of Swoon’s for years. We were huge fans of hers even before she was doing street art, that’s how long we’ve been huge fans of hers. We were huge fans of hers back when she used to sit at the back of class looking alluringly enigmatic and etching deft character studies into her school books with bobby pins. And now we’re all grown up we’re really excited to be doing this show. We’ve been talking with her about it for over a year now and if you’ve seen any photos from her solo installation show or her collaborative show with David Ellis and Faile you’ll know how special this is going to be.

Swoon is a 29 year old Brooklyn-based artist who draws from sources as diverse as German Expressionist woodblock prints and Indonesian shadow puppets. Creating beautiful life-sized character studies from paper cutouts, woodblock prints and linocuts, Swoon has been a breath of fresh air, bringing a deft feminine sensibility to the predominantly male world of street art.

Represented in NY by the highly regarded Jeffrey Deitch at his Deitch Projects Gallery, Swoon has garnered huge critical acclaim for her installation shows. In 2006 MOMA showed an installation and purchased a number of works for their collection.

David Ellis is North Carolina-born, Brooklyn-based artist whose work constitutes improvised interpretations of music and sound, in the spirit of jazz syncopation. His paintings are often recorded in a form of digital time lapse animation Ellis calls ‘motion painting’. Ellis often works directly on the walls of spaces that remain open to the public during installation and shares the making of the work with viewers – like a live band in front of an audience.

His motion painting, Paint on trucks in a world in need of love was recently exhibited at MoMA

Monica Canilao is a young Oakland-based graduate of the California College of Arts and Crafts. Canilao uses found paper, collage, sculpture and fabrics to create art that seeks to capture the human condition. Her work seeks to find a beauty and fragile sense of survival in discarded objects, which she feels carry an echo of humanity and a continued sense of embattled spirit.

*For further extended artist bios please visit our website.





BRP