Swoon’s “The Canyon: 1999–2017” will make you swoon!
Also known as Swoon, Caledonia Curry is New York-based artist who recently launched her first career retrospective “The Canyon: 1999–2017” at the Contemporary Arts Center, showcasing a series of re-defined street art spanning from, you guessed it, 1999 to 2017.
Showcasing modern art in a “street-savvy” exhibition
Swoon, the street artist and sculptor of “The Canyon”, claims that “there are so many different ways that art can function. In some ways, the role of art is to bring things to consciousness that aren’t conscious — to help you deal with these feelings both individually but also as a culture.” Swoon has been working on her exhibition for more than six months and she clearly isn’t daunted by heavy subjects. Her “street-savvy” modern art is showcased using various art techniques, including paper and wheat paste, drawings, prints, wallpaper, rafts made out of garbage and portraits.
Swoon’s art exhibition features nearly two decades of work and effort
Swoon’s piece of art is perfect for the Contemporary Arts Center’s traditional and challenging architecture. According to her, naming her art project “The Canyon” implies a larger metaphor that would make one think of the various layers of time in a geological location while observing her work. For someone whose art career began on the streets, Swoon and her crew of contracted workers and studio regulars have collaborated together for over 12 hours per day for six weeks to install her art project. Although this may seem like a short period of time, Swoon’s “The Canyon: 1999–2017” features a multi-faceted artwork of almost two decades.
“The Canyon: 1999–2017” has many stories to tell
“The Canyon” is showcased in a chronological “Time Capsule” installation which revolves around her artworks in the street and with various communities of the world. One of her art pieces examines issues of social justice which has been inspired by crosses painted on light posts in Juarez, Mexico while crossing the U.S/Mexico border. These large amounts of crosses denote the number of murdered women during drug trade. Swoon explains that “it felt very much like (the issue) was being left to Mexico to deal with, but it seemed like something that we also needed to take responsibility for and think about.”
She further adds, “Once I started looking at the issue through the lens of art, then I started getting invitations from people who were like, ‘Hey, help us think this through,’”. The past decade was a hectic time for Swoon who worked together with various communities that had a story to share with the world. These included victims of trauma struggling in Philadelphia or refugees from Kenya, Syria, and Afghanistan. Her artworks celebrate the spirit of resilience, strength and clearly rejects the “tragic image” behind the stories.
For Swoon, “You can have a story, but how you relay that publicly is another challenge. Sometimes people become more human when we see more sides of them. Just having been through a shitty situation doesn’t destroy you as a person. You still have all this richness and beauty that’s part of who you are. And to represent that while representing the tough story is to understand that and see ourselves as a whole, or more than the worst things that ever happened to us.”
