Swoon | Wholeness in Mind
Turner Carroll Gallery 725 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501 505.986.9800 turnercarrollgallery.com info@turnercarrollgallery.com ©2021 Turner Carroll Gallery Essay: Tonya Turner Carroll Design: Darcy Spencer and Jeffery Kuiper Above Image: Edline, 2017 silkscreen and acrylic gouache on handmade paper 20 x 24” framed, 13.5 x 18” finished size Front Cover: Moni and the Sphinx, 2019 block print and acrylic gouache on paper on wooden painters panel 60 x 48 x 1.75” Back Cover: Yaya, 2017 Silkscreen and acrylic gouache on handmade paper 25 x 19”
Swoon | Wholeness in Mind To swoon is to enter a state of rapture or ecstasy “SWOON is an agent for change powered by Caledonia Dance Curry, and her empathy for humanity is boundless and borderless. Consistently using her art practice to foster healing, even referring to it as a balm, she has built shelter, creative jobs, and opportunities for therapeutic recovery from trauma through her communitybased compassion projects. Her approach is inclusive, authentic and working as a catalyst for positivity, the momentum she’s built is incomparable in the art world.” Juxtapoz Magazine interview by Kristin Farr. Caledonia Dance Curry, whose work appears under the name Swoon, is a Brooklyn-based artist known as the first woman to gain large-scale recognition in the male-dominated world of street art. As a fearless art student at Pratt Institute, Callie took to the streets of New York and illicitly pasted her achingly empathetic portraits to walls and buildings. She inspired an entire generation of female street artists. Part of being a street artist is remaining in the realm of street art—a sort of communal practice of art-making that shuns the world of art galleries and the commodification of art. Swoon’s street art is inherently temporary, made of paper and wheat paste that will eventually decompose outside in the elements. The temporal nature of the work is what makes it feel so incredibly human. Just like all of us, her artworks have only a brief time on this earth. Swoon always seeks to use artmaking as a tool for personal and community healing. While her imagery contains bits of myth and fairytale, she is never afraid to dig into the darker aspects of her subjects. Swoon herself is a child of drug-addicted parents, and her portraits of them show a deep compassion that may help others understand that their family history does not have to determine their lives. Swoon’s street art portraits have appeared throughout the world: on the Berlin Wall, on the wall separating Palestine from Israel, in India, Ukraine, China, Brazil, Italy, Indonesia, Haiti, and Mexico, among others locales. By taking her work beyond the sides of buildings Swoon realized that she could engage the communities where she worked. She expanded her street art practice to create sculptures, boats, collages, paintings, living structures, human-scale music boxes, and installations for museum and gallery spaces as well as participatory social projects. In 2009 she gathered friends and made a boat that floated through the Grand Canal during the Venice Biennale. Later, she constructed earthquake-resistant community art structures in Haiti through her Konbit Shelter initiative and donated her house in Braddock, Pennsylvania to become a shelter for women transitioning from addiction. In 2021, Swoon is collaborating with PBS American Portrait by transforming a box truck into a diorama that drives around New York City encouraging people to speak about the legacy they inherit and what they choose to leave behind. Swoon’s iconography centers around symbols of home and relationships. She says, “The house is really the container for everything that happens in the piece, and, in a way, represents a container for the psyche...homes are...deeply rooted. I find myself returning to them over and over again, sometimes as temples or sheltering spaces, sometimes as anarchic symbols of self-created freedom, sometimes as symbols which hold stories, divulge secrets and teach me things.” Swoon is one of the few artists to have been embraced by not only the street art community, but by collectors and museum curators as well. From the Tate Modern to the Museum of Modern Art, Swoon’s works are in museum collections throughout the world.
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Dawn and Gemma
2019
silkscreen, acrylic gouache on paper and wooden painters panel
48 x 48 x 2”
Alison The Lacemaker
2020
silkscreen, acrylic gouache on dyed cotton pulp and collage
18.5 x 24”
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Walkie
2019
silkscreen, acrylic gouache, hand cut paper on found object (glass and wood)
34 x 31 x 2”
Edline
2016
block print on paper on metal door
83 x 44 x 2.5”
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Maram
2019
block print, paper, acrylic gouache on wooden painters panel
72 x 48 x 2.5”
Jewel Flower
2019
block print, paper, acrylic gouache on found object (wooden shutter)
46 x 21 x 1.5”
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Thalassa
2020
silkscreen, acrylic gouache, collage on paper mounted to wood
30 x 20”
Alison The Lacemaker
2018
lunch box with cut paper, silkscreen, acrylic gouache and collage
7 x 8 x 11”
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Edline
2016
block print, coffee stain, gouache on mylar
40 x 102”
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Dawn and Gemma Mandala
2016
silkscreen and acrylic gouache on paper, wood and copper 84 x 84”
Sasu And Kasei
2019
hand printed block print, acrylic gouache on wooden painters panel
48 x 36 x 1.75”
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Aba Variant J (Orange and Teal)
2020
silkscreen on Coventry rag with various hand finishing
25 x 20”
Caitlin Variant J (Orange and Teal)
2020
silkscreen on Coventry rag with various hand finishing
25 x 20”
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Moni and the Sphinx
2018
hand printed block print, acrylic gouache on paper and wooden doors
70 x 62”
Neenee
2020
hand printed block print, hand painted acrylic gouache on paper mounted to wood
18.5 x 24”
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George
2020
hand printed block print, acrylic gouache, collage on paper and found object
44.5 x 36.5 x 2”
Selection of small drawings in various mediums and dimensions
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Photo credit: Bryan Derballa
Swoon
Caledonia Dance Curry, who works under the name Swoon, is recognized around the world for her pioneering vision of public artwork. Curry’s gallery and museum exhibitions are deeply influenced by her activism and community projects outside of traditional gallery spaces. She has founded and led multiple collaborative projects that use art to respond to crisis. These include Konbit Shelter in response to the 2011 earthquake in Haiti, Music Box in response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2011, Braddock Tiles in response to the economic crisis in Braddock, Pennsylvania, and The Road Home in collaboration with Philadelphia Mural Arts and the Million Person Project in response to the opioid epidemic in North Philadelphia. She is also known for her floating sculptures and experimental living projects on water that include The Miss Rockaway Armada (Mississippi River), Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea (Hudson River), and the Swimming Cities of Serenissima (Adriatic Sea) that crashed the 2009 Venice Biennale. In 2015 she founded the Heliotrope Foundation to support her social justice projects. Curry has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in major museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York; the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Skissernas Museum in Lund, Sweden, MIMA Contemporary Art Museum in Brussels, Belgium, and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her first museum retrospective was The Canyon: 1999–2017 at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati. Her work is held in public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
SELECTED COLLECTIONS Tate Modern Museum of Modern Art MoMA PS1 (permanent site specific installation) Brooklyn Museum of Art Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art Institute of Contemporary Art Boston Detroit Institute of Arts Minneapolis Institute of Art Tudor Investments Principal Financial Fidelity Investments NoVo Foundation Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation Jeffrey Deitch
turnercarrollgallery.com | 725 Canyon Road | Santa Fe, NM 87501 | 505.986.9800