Urban Art Association

Did anyone else that went to the show manage to take pictures? If so, can you post them?

I saw that they'd added more pieces on NIA website. I know at the last show Marsea had a number of pieces that were never shown but available.

I got one. A very cool gesture on behalf of the artist. A personalized letter signed by hand in pencil thanking me for the www.JustSeeds.org purchase. And a gift of a screenprinted piece of fabric. Classy move, and appreciated -- reminds me of how Faile sometimes add little things in their packages to thank buyers.

Do you think she is single and ready to mingle?

"Los Angeles Times" reviews Swoon at New Image Art
March 7, 2008
AROUND THE GALLERIES
By Leah Ollman, Special to The Times

In her raw, ravishing installation at New Image Art, the artist who goes by the name Swoon thrusts us into the divide between gritty reality and elaborate fantasy. Both realms are beautiful, rich and seductive under her extraordinary touch, and each bears fundamental aspects of the other: Within the roughness lies ample tenderness, and within the fantasy a darkness and edge.

Swoon has been pasting prints and paper cutouts on the streets of New York for nearly a decade. In her first solo show in L.A., she brings the energy and vitality of the city indoors. Along one long wall, she leans old doors and assorted other discarded panels, a bicycle and a gate cut out of cardboard. Among the castoffs are images printed onto thin paper and wedded to the walls -- a portrait of a woman and her children; another of a man with a bicycle lock slung over one shoulder whose body transforms into an urban landscape of its own; a garbage truck; a scenario of small silhouetted figures on a branch overhanging an ornate, dilapidated dome.

The wall on the opposite side of the gallery is painted a deep, delicious red and covered with white stenciled patterns, ornamental paper cutouts and multiple images of a woman, her upper half an alluring siren, her lower half a spectral, skeletal mermaid. A full-size canoe juts out from one corner, as if to navigate the threshold between these poignant, robust realms.

Swoon's work is about salvage on several levels. She reinvigorates trashed materials and affirms the dignity of the overlooked, humble and transient. She has a keen sense of human form and gesture and a gorgeous command of the block print medium. Her resourcefulness with materials signals a kind of elasticity of mind, an equal embrace of the mythic and ordinary, a recognition of both as magnificent, relevant and necessary.

February 21, 2008
Scenes from Swoon's global experiences -- real and imagined
By -- Mindy.Farabee @latimes.com

CONSIDERING the title of the new solo exhibit by the artist known as Swoon -- "Drown Your Boats" -- it's not surprising there's a canoe sitting in the center of the New Image Art Gallery in West Hollywood. On a wall above floats a life-sized pair of skeletal mermaids, white paper cutouts rendered in the artist's lacy signature style. But turn just slightly, and the scene shifts: a Mexico City street sweeper emerges on the opposite wall. Behind him, a New York City takeout window bustles. Around the corner stand three Palestinian boys. "Every place I go layers up in my head," Swoon says. "I want to create an environment where they can coexist and play together."

Swoon -- a.k.a. Caledonia Curry, who grew up in a house on a dirt road outside Daytona Beach, Fla. -- seeks to construct mythical cityscapes that serve as palimpsests for the stories, characters and images she's stored up while living in New York City and traveling the world.

To do that, Curry and a crew of three spent a week and a half assembling the floor-to-ceiling installation at New Image. The result is a tableau of etchings and prints executed via various techniques (linoleum relief, wood block and silk screen), then pasted atop a base of locally culled, found objects -- old newspapers, cast-off doors and much cardboard.

The layering of materials echoes Curry's layering of ideas, a theme that runs through her cast of characters as well. Her visions are populated by people real and imagined, or at times both, such as when she restyled a woman spied upon a street corner as the witchy Baba Yaga of Russian folklore. But urban areas, with their ceaseless cultural churning, are not only an ideal staging ground for this sort of complexity; Curry sees them as important subjects in their own right.

"This is the first time in history that more people live in cities than anywhere else," she says. "They are the most massive thing we create. In human endeavors, they're the masterpiece."

While appropriately large-scale, installations are a relatively new medium for Curry, who first garnered notice by papering New York City with cutouts. Though her work is collected by institutions such as New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, she prefers nontraditional venues. "Museums are like textbooks of what's been done," she says. "They're such a small part of the picture."

Which is why that canoe really floats. Two years ago, Curry sailed down the Mississippi along with a flotilla of artists in makeshift rafts, docking routinely to perform variety shows and hold workshops. She's since completed a second such jaunt, and later this year, a similar excursion is scheduled for the Hudson River. Classically trained as a painter, Curry traded the Old Masters for street art to better record and distill present-day realities. Like cities, rivers too fill that need. "I like to be outside," she says, "creating a dialogue with people."

Read the original articles:

by Leah Ollman
by Mindy Farabee
Review by Cool Hunting

Agreed, Pez. It just doesn't make sense.

Bang on Pez. She is the real deal imo

BONGO THINK THAT IF SWOON LEVERAGERED HER SEXUALITY MORE, SHE WOULD BE MUCH MORE MARKETABLE

Lol

No, I was just saying (predicting) what Bongo thinks. That's why I said "BONGO THINK".

Wonders if Bongo knows SWOON or has even met her? To suggest that she leverage her sexuality is pretty hilarious!!!

She's a fantastic artist who will continue to follow a very strong and consistently upward path in the art-world. All you have to do is look at who she works with as her main dealers; Deitch and Goldberg. She is a very capable artist who's value rests in very capable hands... Not that any of that matters.

Can you say she's a sure thing? No, but she's true and pure, and who cares about a year, or fifty from now. Just enjoy the art. She's doing some incredible work right now. Her best work to date is still on the tower in Bethlehem, in my opinion.

edit: I really found it interesting that she's using her real name as well as her art name now. I had a really long conversation with her about that a few months ago. I was encouraging her to move away from SWOON, and more towards Callie. Just my opinion, but I don't think fake names serve these artist's anymore. The context is gone, so does the meaning... Who cares about "cool factor" anymore in street art? I think it's moving from a trendy new genre of art into somethng that is developing a sustainable base and a new found legtimacy in the art world. Now that it's respected, the artist's should respect themselves enough to use their real identity. Now that they can stand by their work they should, and it's nice to see Callie stepping out publicly and taking that acclaim for herself. We all know she's worked more than hard enough for it.

Congrats on the fine article, SWOON!

Cute, yes, but definitely out of character... that's all I was saying.

Sounds like you've got a crush... I can see you blushing through your typing.

most street art are either/and/or full of angst, macho posturing and dark/ironic humour,

swoon's stuff give me goosebumps....

Interesting article. Thanks for posting that up.

no website....some nice snaps on www.deitch.com . Her NYC gallery. From my experience, she is a very kind person and is one of the only artists here with a story to tell through her work.