Photo by Tom Powel Imaging

Swoon, Swimming Cities Switchback Sea (2008). mixed media. Installation view, Deitch Studios, New York

December 2008 Reviews

Street Art, Street Life

Third Guangzhou Trennial

Charles Avery

Martin Ramirez

Richard Kern

Colin Chillag

The Greenroom

Bending the Word

Robert Motherwell

I Am Never At Home

Mr.

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During the summers of 2006 and 2007, the street artist known as Swoon and a cadre of young collaborators used recycled materials to build a small group of fortified rafts they then sailed down the Mississippi River. Last summer, Deitch Projects backed a similar excursion on the Hudson, although this time around, the boats were deemed "sculptures." After a three-week trip, which included stops for public performances of music and theater that complemented the project's overall folksy yet cutting-edge junk-and-craft aesthetic, six sculptures docked next to Deitch Studios, the Manhattan gallery's exhibition space in Long Island City, Queens, for a six-week stay.

Relying on environmentally friendly components, including their motors and fuel, these were stout yet fragile vessels (in fact, one of the original seven broke apart on the journey). Each sculpture was creatively assembled from detritus postindustrial enough to take on a 19th-century hue: one resembled a riverboat festooned with faux smokestacks and waterwheels; another fashioned sails from lace, curtains, and blankets; a third was decorated with bicycle tires and pieces of fence.

To accompany the flotilla moored outside, Swoon created a large installation in the exhibition space proper. A tangle of thick ropes and cords stretched out toward the dock from a central pyramidal cluster of scraps, old furniture, and large woodcut prints of sheltering female figures. An imaginary waterline horizontally divided the gallery as tendrils from white paper-cutout cityscapes snaked down and ghostly wheat-pasted figures of women and children floated along the walls. Here, Swoon's ongoing artistic embrace of disappearing voices and traditions lost little of its impact in swelling to utopian and near-mythic proportions — both in and out of the water.

"Swoon" originally appeared in the December 2008 / January 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' December 2008 / January 2009 Table of Contents.