Beginning September 26, Caledonia Curry, known to her friends as Callie and to the art world as Swoon, will transform Albright-Knox Northland into an open and meditative environment featuring a number of her large-scale sculptural installations as well as her first stop-motion animation video. Equally important for the artist, however, is the space set aside for individual reading, meditation, and contemplation and public programming. In collaboration with local wellness and mental health workers, Swoon hopes to organize a series of programs to support efforts to alleviate stress in our community and work toward healing from trauma.
This exhibition is organized by Curator of Public Art Aaron Ott.
Admission to Albright-Knox Northland is always Pay What You Wish.
Albright-Knox Northland will remain closed through September 25, as the planned exhibition for summer 2020 was postponed to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The museum will monitor developments and continue gathering information on the status of the pandemic and its potential impact on the reopening date, and will share updates on its website and on social media.
About the Artist
Since achieving acclaim in the early 2000s for her deeply empathetic portraits illicitly wheat-pasted to buildings around New York, Swoon has expanded to creating sculptures, collages, paintings, and installations for museum and gallery spaces as well as participatory social projects, including working with residents of Braddock, Pennsylvania, on a series of community revitalization and job creation initiatives and developing models for earthquake-resistant structures in Haiti through Konbit Shelter. Connecting all these endeavors, for the artist, is a deep commitment to a spirit of generosity and an understanding of artmaking and sharing as a process of personal and communal healing and working through monumental change.
Le duo d’artistes Paul Ressencourt et Simon Roche parle aux murs comme personne et crée à quatre mains des scènes pleines de poésie et de sens dans la rue.
Pouvez-vous présenter votre parcours ?
Nous nous sommes rencontrés aux Beaux-Arts en 2006. Simon avait déjà de très bonnes bases en dessin ; quant à moi (Paul), j’avais plus de facilités dans les compositions. Nous étions complémentaires : c’est ce qui nous permet de collaborer encore aujourd’hui.
Votre style pictural a-t-il évolué depuis les Beaux-Arts ?
Notre style pictural a constamment évolué et, plus particulièrement, il y a trois ans. Auparavant, nous réalisions directement nos dessins pour la rue. Désormais, nous procédons à un travail de recherche en intérieur et ensuite créons nos dessins pour l’espace urbain. Enfin, nous avons évolué quant à la recherche de sens dans notre travail : notamment avec notre projet “Cueillette” qui représente deux personnes vêtues de combinaisons chimiques : vision contrebalancée par la fleur enfantine qu’elles cueillent. Nous avons alors amorcé un véritable virage. Nous travaillions jusqu’ici à la pierre noire, à l’encre de Chine et en noir et blanc. Nous avons ensuite introduit la peinture, les crayons de couleur et d’autres matières et textures que nous avons mélangées.
Quels messages souhaitez-vous véhiculer au travers de vos dessins ?
Nous traitons de l’écologie au même titre que nous pouvons traiter du consumérisme. De manière générale, nous souhaitons aborder des problèmes sociétaux, des absurdités que nous constatons. Nous ne tenons pas à réaliser un travail purement esthétique. Nous souhaitons que l’œuvre en elle-même mais également l’environnement urbain dans laquelle on la place, aient un sens. Nous envisageons notre travail d’artistes comme étant un travail de mise en exergue des problèmes sociétaux et ce, de manière onirique et poétique. Nous recherchons ainsi le juste équilibre entre sens, esthétique et singularité.
Quelles sont vos inspirations ?
Ces dernières années, nous avons été influencés par le travail de Pejac, le premier artiste à avoir fait du street art “écolo engagé” sans tomber dans le pathos. Mais initialement, nous sommes tous les deux tout particulièrement influencés par Ernest Pignon-Ernest. Il nous a fait comprendre l’importance du sujet d’une œuvre et le choix de son emplacement dans la rue : de manière générale, il nous a fait comprendre la justification de l’œuvre dans la rue.
Vous définissez-vous comme street artistes ? Et pour quelles raisons ?
Nous nous définissons comme street artistes : nous ne ressentons pas le besoin de se dire artistes contemporains. Toutes nos recherches actuelles, nous les pensons en tant que street artistes. Nous réfléchissons beaucoup à l’art à destination d’un public profane. Nous trouvons l’art contemporain très élitiste, presque inaccessible, fait “de références à des références de références”. Depuis le début, nous tentons d’offrir une esthétique élégante malgré les sujets traités tels que le sac poubelle. Nous ne souhaitions pas présenter un art qui constituerait une abstraction mentale, peu naturelle. C’est en cela que nous nous définissons comme street artistes, en proposant un art plus accessible sans être bête mais qui ne va pas piocher dans les tréfonds des archives de l’histoire de l’art. Le deuxième axe qui nous intéresse dans le street art est la réalité des “backgrounds” qu’on trouve naturellement dans la rue. Tout devient partie intégrante de l’œuvre : le passant qui déchire le collage, le passant qui s’arrête pour regarder le collage, les aléas climatiques qui peuvent parfaire l’œuvre, le recul qu’un passant peut avoir par rapport à une œuvre dans une rue étroite. Tous nos collages sont tirés de dessins que nous réalisons à l’échelle 1 – il ne s’agit pas d’agrandissement de petits formats : l’espace d’accueil présente donc un impact réel sur notre travail. Nous utilisons également la texture d’un spot afin que les grains du mur deviennent les grains d’une peau ou les craquelures des rides. D’ailleurs, si nous ne travaillons pas à la bombe, c’est parce que celle-ci donne un rendu trop lisse ; or, nous préférons des textures plus intéressantes sur lesquelles nous utilisons la peinture à la brosse par exemple.
Pouvez-vous nous décrire votre façon de travailler “à quatre mains” ?
Nous faisons tout tous les deux. Simon travaille plutôt le dessin de contour et moi (Paul) le dessin de masse qui s’attache au volume et à la texture. Nous nous remettons constamment en question. C’est dans la discussion et dans la réalisation à quatre mains qu’on arrive au résultat final. L’œuvre n’est finie que lorsque nous sommes satisfaits l’un et l’autre.
Pouvez-vous nous dévoiler vos futurs projets ?
Nous venons de terminer l’exposition “GARB-AGE”, notre premier solo show sur les conséquences écologiques de l’usage du sac poubelle : nous souhaiterions d’ailleurs placer une œuvre représentant une queue de baleine en sac poubelle dans un endroit faisant face à la mer pour y permettre des reflets. Nous sommes désormais représentés par deux galeries, une parisienne et une basée à Los Angeles qui travaillent ensemble mais présentent des cultures différentes. Enfin, nous collaborons avec la société d’édition “Graffiti Prints”. Nous sommes en effet tous deux passionnés par la lithographie et nous souhaitons réaliser une œuvre représentant un océan de sacs poubelles via le print.
After 20 years on the scene, the artist’s mythological creations evolve.
The artist known as Swoon sits at a sketch table in her Red Hook, Brooklyn studio, fiddling with a disembodied papier-mâché head.
“There’s nothing private,” she says, running a hand through her wild curls as I roam one of two rooms she rents in a labyrinthine artists-and-makers’ complex. Behind her hangs a large-scale mural depicting gritty but feminine myth-like scenes of motherhood. Smaller, ethereal cut-out portraits of women, many of them family and friends, are arranged in small clusters on the surrounding walls.
Because she hosted a party here recently, her studio is tidier than usual, she says, seemingly by way of apology.
The spaces Swoon creates are more often overflowing: Her recent show Cicada, at the Jeffrey Deitch gallery in New York, features a tangle of wire and cloth spilling out of the wall into a lush, overgrown swamp-like scene. Paper flowers and insects swarm a mer-like character, who cracks her ribs open to reveal snakes uncoiling from her heart. The fabric jumble appears to be gobbling up another figure, its limbs disappearing like moss-choked flotsam.
Cicada, 2019, installation view at Jeffrey Deitch gallery. Photographed by Genevieve Hanson.
The recent body of work she’s been developing, beginning with Cicada, marks a new direction for Swoon. Injecting her characters with movement, she has adopted into her practice an entirely new medium she’s spent the past two years teaching herself: stop-motion film. Meanwhile, her visual language has taken on a more explicitly sinister and introspective tone, a departure for an artist who made her name beautifying the outside world.
Swoon, born Caledonia Curry in New London, Connecticut (she spent most of her childhood in Daytona Beach, Florida), began pasting her dreamy ink-block portraits on city walls in the late 1990s. Alongside peers like Shepard Fairey, Banksy and her good friend JR, she became central to a youth movement fueling street art’s ascent. Swoon was one of the few women to gain recognition in that world. Her bold, feminine murals, with nods to Greek mythology, soon captivated major museums and galleries, which she filled with immersive multimedia installations.
Her 2014 exhibit Submerged Motherlands shaded viewers under a paper tree that reached the height of the Brooklyn Museum’s 72-foot-tall rotunda. It was the museum’s first solo show dedicated to a living street artist.
Thalassa, 2013, street paste-up.
From early on, Swoon saw art as a medium for activism, creating “spaces of wonder” that bring people together. In New Orleans, together with the New Orleans Airlift collective, she created a musical village whose ramshackle treehouses double as functioning instruments. With her community of punk artists and DIY craftspeople she famously built three rafts out of garbage and sailed them across the Adriatic Sea and into the Venice Biennale, uninvited. The renegade crew invited onlookers to join them onboard.
“Swoon’s practice is based in generosity,” says Anne Pasternak, the director of the Brooklyn Museum and a longtime champion of Swoon. “She wants to create dignified, humanistic, beautiful things about people, for people. She uplifts those who are less visible in our society, and she transforms the most banal and even devastated sites into places for real beauty.”
After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Swoon launched a decade-long project building colorful, disaster-resistant homes in the remote village of Cormiers. Having just finished the rafts, Swoon says, “I was working with a lot of artists and builders that knew how to confront exceptionally difficult situations and problem solve in unusual ways. I had an instinct that we could make that skillset useful.”
Submerged Motherlands, 2014, installation view at Brooklyn Museum of Art. Photographed by Tod Seelie.
In Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, which has one of the highest rates of opiate overdoses in the country, she leads an art therapy workshop for people in the throes of addiction. It’s a project she plans to grow in tandem with her outspoken efforts to combat the stigma surrounding addiction.
If there’s a thread that runs through Swoon’s diverse body of work, it’s “that idea that creativity can be a really powerful part of how you rebuild after disasters of any kind,” she says. “Social, physical, all different kinds.”
Swoon’s early life was colored by the chaos of her parents’ heroin addiction and struggles with mental illness. Forgiving them took years of therapy and meant reconciling memories of fear and trauma with memories of joy. “I literally thought my mom was going to kill me sometimes,” she says, describing a weeklong psychosis her mother experienced when Swoon was six. “And my mom would bake big zucchini bread and take me to art classes and be this wonderful person, and those two things are just true.”
The Music Box, 2012, New Orleans. Photographed by Tod Seelie.
That dual nature became a central refrain in Swoon’s work, the figure of “dark mother goddess” looming large in many of her installations. Partially autobiographical, her art was both an escape and a form of therapy.
“Almost whatever I’m doing, it’s going to be through art,” she says. “Am I thinking through a problem? It’s going to happen through art. Am I healing all these old wounds? It’s going to happen through art. Am I getting friends together? Art.”
Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, 2008, on the Hudson River. Photographed by Tod Seelie.
In Cicada and in her growing body of stop-motion films, Swoon uses art to go inward, unearthing the trauma lodged in parts of her mind she hadn’t dared explore.
Behind the swamp-like installation that welcomes visitors to Cicada and an adjoining room filled with portraits of her friends is the show’s centerpiece: a small movie theater where a five-minute, semi-narrative reel brings Swoon’s characters to life.
Anomal : qui présente un caractère d’irrégularité. Anomal, animal, anormal, du grec anômalos, inégal. En botanique, le terme qualifie une espèce inclassable, comme l’est le travail de Quentin Garel. Sculpteur travaillant le bois, le bronze, comme le fer, l’artiste diplômé de l’École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris puise son inspiration dans l’archéologie et les musées d’histoire naturelle pour créer son propre bestiaire qu’il présente depuis le 25 janvier 2020, dans une exposition monographique d’œuvres récentes au domaine départemental de Chamarande. Quel plus bel écrin qu’un château du XVIIe siècle bâti dans le plus pur style Louis XIII – attribué à Nicolas de L’Espine, architecte du roi – pour y dresser une quarantaine de pièces monumentales, tels les totems emblématiques, d’une parodie du trophée de chasse à courre anticipée ! Car tantôt réaliste, tantôt fantastique, la figure de l’animal est ici domestique, figée dans une expression d’un réalisme troublant. Quentin Garel dessine, sculpte, polit jusqu’à ce que la matière vivante du bois et de ses veines corresponde exactement à son dessein, et si l’ancien résident de la Casa Velazquez de Madrid utilise la tronçonneuse comme outil de dégrossissage, le fusain et la craie lui permettent de réaliser des esquisses préparatoires dont les dégradés de gris et l’expressivité des regards révèlent toute la virtuosité d’un travail à la main empreint de tradition. Dans l’esprit d’un cabinet de curiosité futuriste et géant, Garel instaure ici un dialogue avec « l’anomalité » révélée de ses sujets dont la matière, bois et bronze, entre en résonance avec le classicisme des lieux. L’exposition initiée le 25 janvier est prolongée jusqu’au 14 juin inclus ! En accès libre, le mercredi de 14 à 18h, et les samedi et dimanche de 13h à 18h en juin. Le parc est ouvert tous les jours de 9h à 20h de juin à septembre. Plus d’informations ici !
Les artistes français Paul Ressencourt et Simon Roche, plus connus sous le nom du duo Murmure, proposent une nouvelle série d’œuvres autour du sac poubelle intitulée “Garb-age” et explore ainsi l’impact de l’homme sur son environnement.
Le duo français imagine des créations en noir et blanc en jouant avec le reflet de la lumière sur le plastique des sacs poubelles qui se voient déclinés sous différentes formes le temps d’une série de dessins et fresques murales. Cet objet du quotidien est détourné pour se transformer en baleine ou en oiseaux, habiller le visage de deux amoureux ou faire office de fond marin. Les deux artistes confiaient à Juxtapoz : “L’idée principale était de jouer avec les couleurs d’un sac poubelle noir ordinaire autant que possible. Non seulement pour son attrait dramatique, mais aussi pour la profondeur des nuances et, en quelque sorte, l’élégance de sa texture et sa réaction à la lumière.”
À travers ce projet, Paul Ressencourt et Simon Roche souhaitent mettre en lumière la crise environnementale que nous connaissons et notamment la responsabilité de l’homme sur ces dérèglements climatiques. “Chaque œuvre est une image forte reflétant les choix auxquels tout le monde est confronté quotidiennement, entre notre connaissance des enjeux et les actions que nous pourrions faire mais ne faisons pas” partage le duo.
Le projet “Garb-age” de Murmure est actuellement présenté à la Galerie LJ de Paris qui propose une visite virtuelle de l’exposition sur son Instagram étant donné la fermeture de l’établissement suite à l’épidémie de coronavirus.
In their latest show now open at Galerie LJ in Paris, French street art duo Mumureuses black garbage bags as a medium to illustrate waste’s impact on the environment. Garbage birds flying south, an oil rig in an inky sea, and a trashbag lovers’ embrace are just a few of the powerful images forwarning a threatening dark future. We spoke to Murmure ahead of the show and learned more about their project as they traverse Europe, from Vladivostok and Rotterdam, and back to Paris.
Sasha Bogojev: What draws you to almost exclusively black and white imagery? Murmure: For this project, the main idea was to play with the colors of a regular black garbage bag as much as possible. Not only for dramatic appeal, but also for the depth of shades and, somehow, the elegance of its texture and reaction to light. That’s why we use graphite pencil, to achieve this texture. Black and white drawings allow, in a way, going straight to the point, to focus on the drawing for what it is, without any artifice. We use tiny touches of color–mostly red–as the red ‘thread’ of the garbage bag’s handle and a narrative ‘thread’ (it’s a word game in French, “le fil rouge”, literally translated as “red thread.” In English, it’s an expression that means “general subject matter”).
How do you feel about your work being compared to names like Banksy and Pejac, to name a couple? Well, it is flattering, for sure. We do not wish to do street art just to bring illustration or graphics to the street. We want to work on subjects that matter to us, to bring something personal and share our vision, as artists, of the world around us. In that sense, we like the work of artists such as Banksy or Pejac, but also many others, such as Ernest Pignon-Ernest.
What type of work have you prepared for this presentation and what techniques are employed? We are showcasing a year of work on the subject Garbage, which we spell “Garb-age,” as in, the rise of a new era. For this exhibition, we present this theme in its full extent, from nature and its various elements, to man, flora and fauna. We made about 20 drawings on paper, ranging from medium size (50 x 70 cm for the smallest) to large scale (up to 210 x 270 cm for Mauvaises Graines/Bad Seeds, or 135 x 210 cm for Garbage Whale Tail). The main medium used is a graphite pencil on paper, a bit of colored pencil and acrylic painting for the touches of color. The whole idea of this show is to warn of the current state of our planet, due to a dramatic spiral of over-consumerism. The garbage bags become birds, whale or oil spills, all symbols of a planet reaching an era of unreason.
Did you create an installation for the exhibition, or simply introduce the studio works in a “white cube” space? The exhibition at Galerie LJ showcases studio work but also highlights work made for the street. We present life-size drawings so visitors can understand the link between our vision of studio work and street art. We are also giving away a newspaper we made as a catalog for each work in Garb-age, showing all the means of expression used this past year (studio, paste-ups, murals and screen prints). This publication, like a fanzine, was made with recycled paper and is a statement for action on this ecological emergency.
What emotions do you hope to evoke from the viewer? The main goal of this exhibition is to show how art, and how street art can be singular, meaningful, and personal. We hope visitors will appreciate the technique used, but also the poetry and elegance we attempt to convey through pictures and narratives. To us, Garb-age is a meaningful project that allows us to raise awareness of important environmental issues. We hope visitors understand our message, but again, everyone is free to interpret our work the way they see it. Some of the work can be “shocking” at first sight, but each is, in our opinion, a powerful image reflecting the choices everyone faces daily, between our knowledge of the issues at stake and what we can do about them but don’t. We would love it if visitors could pass this first impression and understand there’s hope behind every picture created.
Murmure’s Garb-age is on view at Galerie LJ through April 18, 2020.
Quentin Garel ne pouvait rêver plus bel écrin pour ses sculptures animalières que le domaine de Chamarande ! Le château lui offre le décor idéal d’un cabinet de curiosités. L’artiste, dont on a déjà pu voir les œuvres en 2016 au Muséum d’histoire naturelle, laisse s’échapper ses créatures dans les salons, environnées de grandes esquisses – superbes ! Têtes de girafe ou d’autruche, mâchoire de crocodile ou pièce de squelette, l’œil est constamment aux aguets, ne sachant s’il est confronté à la réalité ou bien à une vision fantasmée. Peu importe, l’œuvre est stupéfiante, inclassable ! Une visite à prolonger absolument dans le parc.
For a first solo show, it’s hard to beat exhibiting in the heart of Paris. A stone’s throw from Le Centre Pompidou sits the avant-garde Galerie LJ, known amongst Parisians for its investment in chic emerging artists. Rithika Merchant is no exception. Having exploded onto the international scene in 2018, thanks to her collaboration with the French fashion house Chloé, Merchant’s work has become the object of consistent media attention. Most notably, earning the young artist Vogue’s title of Young Achiever of the Year in 2018.
While Merchant currently lives and works in the vibrant city of Barcelona, she was born in Mumbai, India and was subsequently educated at Parsons in New York City; as well as The Hellenic International Studies In The Arts on the island of Paros, Greece. Given her many colourful homes, Merchant posses a unique cosmopolitan worldview that is detectable in her now recognisable oeuvre. A delectable mixture of Eastern and Western motifs that intermingle with the themes of spirituality, mortality and heritage; Merchant’s best pieces are hybridised treasures that read as both familiar and foreign.
Rithika Merchant, Divine Bodhi 2017, print collaboration for Chloé SS18.
One of the most distinctive elements of Merchant’s work is her choice of medium. While many young contemporary artists favour the staples of acrylic and oil, or are introducing digital elements, Merchant has chosen to work with collage and primarily with gouache and ink on stained paper. A quick history lesson: this technique reaches as far back as ancient Egypt and Greece (consistent with Merchant’s Hellenistic education) and often produces a flat, muted colour palette reminiscent of Indian miniature paintings. Despite being revived by the Impressionists in the nineteenth century, the technique is still only the preference of a select few. Such a distinct choice immediately piqued my interest, as it is noticeably unusual and yet aligns seamlessly with Merchant’s penchant for incorporating mythological symbols – a nod to aeons gone by.
Upon closer inspection, Merchant’s first solo exhibition, Mirror of the Mindat Galerie LJ, features an array of works which share overlapping motifs and compositional similarities. Her reoccurring repertoire of symbols include the evil eye, horoscopic skies, snowy mountain peaks, botanical imagery (the lotus most often), references to palmistry, strong geometric forms (particularly red circles and semi-circles), snakes and large birds of prey. Many of these can also be found in her compositions for the folklore-inspired Chloé collaboration, suggesting Merchant is steadily charting her own unique visual language.
Rithika Merchant, Diffusion 2019, courtesy of Galerie LJ, Paris.
While Merchant has undoubtedly achieved much success through her relationship with Chloé, Mirror of the Mind represents a shift away from the mainstream media and fashion, towards the formalised art world as a whole. Unlike Jeff Koons, who earned notoriety within the art world before embarking on his lucrative fashion collaboration with Louis Vuitton, Merchant is attempting to reverse engineer Koon’s model. A lofty mission that will surely raise the eyebrows of detractors, but one I believe she may very well accomplish.
As a first solo show, Mirror of the Mind is impressive in the number of works and the sheer detailed nature of each piece, however; there is a discernible ‘greenness’ to the collection – a subtle disconnect in the selection of works. In my estimation, the body of work can be divided into two groups – cleanly composed mirror images (where if I drew a line down the centre of the image, each side would mirror the other) and narrative scenes that edge towards the overly illustrative. The ‘mirrored images,’ which include Nazarbattu (2019), Diffusion (2019) and Memory Tree (2019) are, in my opinion, the strongest works due to their balanced composition and the much-needed inclusion of negative space.
Rithika Merchant, Nazarbattu 2019, courtesy of Galerie LJ, Paris.
In her ‘mirrored images,’ Merchant demonstrates the invaluable ability to edit her compositions in favour of legibility and a more poignant visual impact. The works, while simpler than some of their counterparts, more fully communicate Merchant’s worldly artistic influences and allow her incredible details to be fully digested. By contrast, some of the narrative images feel more akin to the illustrations found in Maurice Sendak’s famed children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. Clearly, we are witnessing Merchant experimenting and flexing her muscles as a stand-alone artist, with her forward path yet to be determined.
Merchant herself seems to be a touchpoint for the intermingling of various cultures and industries. India and Greece, Fashion and Fine Art, she cleverly highlights connections that are too often overlooked. A reminder of the fluidity of culture, Merchant’s mystic collages and inky netherworlds will continue to captivate, especially if executed judiciously.
Rithika Merchant, Memory Tree 2019, courtesy of Galerie LJ, Paris.
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