Swoon

15Sep06

Swoon is a 27-year-old New York City-based artist rooted firmly in a post-aerosol street art aesthetic. With her main focus being the creation of person-sized, cut-out paste-ups based upon people in her life, Swoon cultivates awareness in the metropolitan pedestrian that happens upon one of her street pieces. She frontloads her days with caffeine and works on her art late into the night. It can take her two weeks to produce a series of the large, intricate paper cutouts and hand-pulled block prints that have gained her considerable renown in one particular sector of the art world. When she is done - her arms aching and her clothes and skin speckled with paint and ink - she takes her pieces outside, slaps them up on old walls around the city, then disappears on her bike.

She has been covering the streets of New York with her signature cutouts for over six years. Often found in beautiful states of decay, her wheat-pasted cut outs “collaborate” with the street to create a time-based public artwork. In conjunction with her collective TOYSHOP, she has executed projects ranging from billboard alterations and poster campaigns, to street parties and sculptural installations. Her recent work has focused on creating peepholes throughout the city in subtle places where, once discovered, the viewer can glimpse a hidden dream world through the unassuming aperture.

SWOON’s worlds are often populated by realistically rendered - and evocatively cut-out - street people, often her friends and family. Riding bikes, talking on a stoop, going grocery shopping - these people traverse a cityscape of her own unique invention. Bridges, fire escapes, water towers and street signs create crisscrossing shadows and spaces through which her figures move. Inspired by both art historical and folk sources, ranging from German Expressionist wood block prints to Indonesian shadow puppets, SWOON is a master of using cut paper to play with positive and negative space in a conceptually driven exploration of the experience of the streets.

Filed under: ARt   |  
Tags: ARt, new york, paper cutout, street artist, swoon