New York artist Swoon is taking time out from her more rebellious projects.
FANS of the artist Swoon would no doubt have been happiest if the Brooklyn-based renegade had marked her first trip to Australia by sailing one of her fantastical junk rafts down the Yarra. She has already floated armadas down the Mississippi, the Hudson and across the Adriatic, so launching from the Fairfield boathouse would have proved a cinch. Sadly, they'll have to settle for a staid exhibition of her intricate block prints and silk screens at Armadale's Metro Gallery, in a suburb many associate more with Saabs than stencil art.
Still, 33-year-old Swoon, known to her friends as Callie, says there are reasons for taking on ''polished, mainstream projects'' that don't compromise her anarchic, grassroots philosophy. Exhaustion is one; she has spent the past six months building houses in Haiti. ''I was studying architecture at the time the earthquake hit and and we were working on a type of earthbag construction developed by Iranian architect Nader Khalili called Superadobe. It's super strong and earthquake, flood, typhoon proof, so we decided to go over there and teach it.''
The task has been hard but rewarding. ''Every day it's this question of, 'Where are we going to get the cement to build with today?' Everything is an uphill battle with a thousand considerations just to do the simplest thing.''
By comparison, Armadale is a Shangri-la. ''I'm going on all imagination here. I don't have to care about any of the trillion circumstances that concern me in the real world. I can just hang things with fishing line and tacks,'' she says. ''It's good for my soul in a different way.''
She has a reminder of Haiti with her in the form of a block print: Walki depicts a boy from the village of Barriere Leudi. In fact, every face and figure from the exhibition is a friend from a foreign land. One silk screen depicts three village girls she met in India, another shows Palestinian boys who watched her and British street artist Banksy painting murals on the apartheid wall in Bethlehem.
Other figures include a Mexican street-sweeper, her father and grandfather and friends, crafted from newspaper, tissue paper, tracing paper, paint, cardboard, plastic and remnants of abandoned furniture.
One work reimagines James Ensor's Skeletons Fighting over a Hanged Man, another refers to her time researching femicide in Mexico. The streetscapes of Cairo and the children of Cuba are here too.
Swoon shies from describing herself as an activist, but admits to an insatiable desire for learning, namely about politics, social inequality and anything else that takes her fancy. Beyond exhibitions, her work extends to large-scale street parties and acts of small-scale rebellion.
After being incensed by news reports on the US-led invasion of Iraq, she and some mates baked a series of pies: cherry, apple and blueberry (red, white and blue). They vomited the devoured pies on the pavement by New York's Fox News building.
Most of her work takes a less hostile stance. In New York, she's known for stencils of people and children left on street signs, walkways, bus shelters, subway passages and trains.
''People tell me [the figures] keep them company. Or they say they had a question in their mind that day and when they stumbled on the piece they found the answer.''
The children playing baseball and riding bikes come from her time in Cuba. ''In Havana, all of life happens out on the sidewalk and you just feel like you're part of everything all the time, instead of caught up in this hostile rush. I thought, New York should be more like this, so I made the streets full of kids.''
Her rebellious impulses can't be fettered, even by Armadale. When Premier Ted Baillieu opened her exhibition last week, she saluted his speech by smashing her wine glass on a podium. The response was bemused. Had she sailed a raft down the Yarra, breaking glass to mark its maiden voyage would not have prompted a single batted eyelid.
Swoon's work is on show at Metro Gallery until March 5.
By Liza Power for
theage
Photo: Rodger Cummins