ACTIVITY//Street Art ...Swoon.

SWOON july 07 - august 13, 2005 deitch gallery, new york http://www.deitch.com this is the first new york solo exhibition by the 27-year-old (new york city-based) female street artist known as SWOON. turning the 76 grand street gallery into a ramshackle labyrinthine city of paper and paint transformed both the façade and the interior of the gallery into a handmade cityscape full of hidden corners to discover. taking kawloon walled city as a creative point of departure, she hopes to evoke the spontaneous, unregulated, and often dangerous development that took place in the autonomous hong kong slum before it was bulldozed in 1993. reproducing rooms upon rooms, illegal balconies, unregulated creativity fills this exhibition, as dramatic cutouts of scaffolding, power lines, elevated trains, and all the imposing infrastructure of the city. SWOON’s worlds are often populated by realistically rendered - and evocatively cut-out - street people, often her friends and family. inspired by both art historical and folk sources, ranging from german expressionist wood block prints to indonesian shadow puppets, SWOON is a master of using cut paper to play with positive and negative space in a conceptually driven exploration of the experience of the streets. your cutouts and block prints decorate walls all over the city, masterpieces around the corner... I studied classical painting, renaissance-style painting and portraiture and then when I came to new york, and I no longer felt connected to anything I had thought about art. for at least two years, nothing made sense to me, and everything I did felt aimless and destructive, and then things finally came around. so now when I feel like I’m doing things that make no sense, to me, but I still feel deeply compelled to do them, I take it as a good sign.’ remaining until they flake away or simply rot... ‘when I first began to do street work, part of my impulse had to do with those things that are meant to disappear and the ability to just let things go. I use recycled newsprint that I order in 90-pound rolls. so it’s extremely thin and is one of my favorite papers to use because of the way it decays. it yellows. it cracks. it has this whole life cycle that I really like. your medium needs pre-strike preparation at home and a quick, furtive execution in public... ‘the challenge is to make the cutout so that it can get on the wall as a solid unit in two minutes or less. you learn. it’s a craft. you figure it out.’ any surface goes; the more visible and the less frequently buffed the better... ‘I usually go alone but not always; it's a kind of a meditative process, I ride around (on my bike) and see which spots call to me (so sometimes it's better to do that alone). walls, doors, the backs of stop signs, the base of light poles, utility boxes, trash bins, sidewalks, rooftops, the frames of subway car advertisements, etc. and sometimes in art galleries... galleries give me some more options, because, say, it doesn’t rain in there. but for some reason, I couldn’t make art for the sole purpose of exhibiting in these comatoriums see the full interview HERE One amazingly talented girl who usually puts her work on the streets for the public to see for free, but here documents the run up to her first solo exhibition... 'Wheatpaste is an adhesive created from vegetable starch and water. A print is placed on top of the paste to adhere the artist’s image to a surface. Swoon has been heavily involved with craft-based art projects and uses salvaged materials. The subject matter in these prints varies quite a bit, from very beautiful intricate characters, to purely metaphorical imagery. They are quite striking, very detailed and appear to take a long amount of time.'