Фотограф Тод Сили документирует жизнь художников во время их путешествий по рекам и каналам на оригинальных самодельных плотах. Проект, организованный уличной художницей Каледонией “Кэлли” Карри (Caledonia “Callie” Curry), стартовал в прошлом году, когда художники спустили на воду свою собственноручно сделанную флотилию и отправились в приключение за новым опытом и вдохновением.

На сегодняшний день группа совершила уже четыре поездки: две по Миссисипи, одну по реке Гудзон и последнюю из Словении в Венецию. Сейчас художники планируют в середине августа отправиться в новое приключение в штат Орегон. 

 

 

 

Уроженка Флориды Каледония Карри, более известная миру как Swoon — на сегодняшний день самая успешная уличная художница планеты. Выставки в P.S.1, MOMA, Музее Бруклина и Deitch Projects, пусть и партизанское, но не прошедшее незамеченным участие в 59-ой Венецианской Биеннале, интерес дилеров и коллекционеров — немногие из уличных художников могут похвалиться таким послужным списком.

 

Оригинальная и узнаваемая манера Swoon возникла на пересечении техники wheatpasting — выклеивания заранее созданных в мастерской рисунков на стенах домов — и выразительной графической манеры, выработанной художницей под влиянием Эгона Шиле и графики немецкого экспрессионизма.

 

Помимо выклеивания на стенах домов своих излюбленных персонажей — неблагополучных подростков, замученных жизнью женщин и других персонажей урбанистического театра, Swoon увлекается оригинальной разновидностью публичной скульптуры. В составе основанного ею с друзьями арт-коллектива Miss Rockaway Armada строит фантастические корабли из собранного по берегам рек мусора и сплавляется на них по этим рекам.

 

Born Caledonia Dance Curry, New York based street artist, Swoon, adopted her nom de guerre in 1999 when she begin her career as a graffiti artist. Swoon’s signature street art style involves life size wheatpaste prints of people. Often based on her friends and family, Swoon traditionally roams city streets, prints in tow, looking for the perfect abandoned building, bridge, or water tower to display her art. But as years pass, she has come to garner the attention of more traditional galleries and art critics alike.

Born in 1978 in Connecticut, Swoon was raised in Daytona Beach, Florida before moving to New York City at the age of nineteen. She went on to earn a degree in painting from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and after graduating in 1999, she begin to pursue a less traditional path for her art in the form of graffiti. Her large scale outdoor print installations have been placed by Swoon in cities around the world, and her artistic process is based on the idea that art is immersive, provocative, and transformative.

 

 

Swoon uses scavenged and local materials and embraces print media as a potent means of action for social change. In a dedicated process that must take an exhaustible number of hours, Swoon intricately carves and creates huge wood blocks to then create large ink prints, she fastidiously cuts those out into positive/negative spaces, thusly turning them into her graffiti pieces. She then hits the streets of the world, searching for the perfect spot to display the images we’ve come to love. It’s such a laborious process for something that could only last a few hours before being painted over or otherwise destroyed on city streets.

As time passes, Swoon’s talent has begun to expand beyond what many consider her signature style. In 2008, she organized a moving installation piece on the Hudson River, entitled Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea. This large-scale work makes her human-sized pieces seem small in comparison. It consisted of seven handmade ships loaded with fellow artists that set sail down the divide of New York City and New Jersey. The exhibition attracted the attention of the New York Times, who called it “part floating artwork, part performance, part mobile utopia, and seemingly, part summer camp for grown-up artsy kids” (you can read the full New York Times article on the Swimming Cities). Similar large scale raft projects followed, and the team has taken their work down the Mississippi, as well as their most recent excurison that ended in their invasion of the 2009 Venice Biennale. Swoon is also known for her work as an instigator and collaborator. She founded the Toyshop Collective and the Miss Rockaway Armada, and she is also a member of Just Seeds and the Transformazium.

Besides The New York Times, art critics have taken note, too, and her pieces have been collected by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Tate Modern. Major pieces have appeared at MoMA PS1, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Black Rat Press. For her gallery exhibitions, Swoon has been known to install massive paper cut out displays that tower over the gallery floor. For the past several years, Swoon has also been traveling the United States and abroad, creating exhibitions and holding workshops, including being a keynote speaker for the TED Talks series in 2010, which you can watch.

As you travel the world in your daily life, keep those eyes peeled. Swoon’s life-sized woodblock portraits hang in various states of decay in some of the world’s greatest cities. As her fellow street artist Bansky so eloquently put it, “Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums. Graffiti has more chance of meaning something or changing stuff than anything indoors. Graffiti has been used to start revolutions, stop wars, and generally is the voice of people who aren’t listened to. Graffiti is one of those few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don’t come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make somebody smile while they’re having a piss”.