Magsmill

Career

Street Pasting

Caledonia started her street art in 1999. At the time she was attending Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and studying painting. However she began to feel suffocated by the sense that her life was already laid out for her. She believed that she would simply paint a few pictures that would end up on a wall in a gallery or someone’s home. Her art would only be seen by those affluent enough to go to galleries and buy art. At the same time she was trying to find what she describes as context. She wanted to become part of the world. Her response to this desire was what she believes to be a very literal one: she glued her art to walls. Wheat pasting became a way for her to discover and understand her impact in the world. She describes that as a young women she did not have a sense of her ability to make a change. By putting up a small wheat paste, she was able to transform a wall and it would be there when she walked past it the next day. It was a tiny literal change.

The majority of Swoon’s street art are portraits. She believes that we store things in our body and that a portrait can become an x-ray of those experiences. She wants her portraits to capture something essential in the subject. She tries to document something she loves about the subject and has seen in him or her. It is a way to connect with the subject. By putting the portraits on the streets she is allowing for others to witness this connection and make their own. One such connection has stuck with her throughout the years, mentioning it in multiple interviews. She met a woman who asked her about a small piece of art that she had put up in a neighborhood. The woman proceeded to tell her that a mentally disabled man who lived in the neighborhood had started to call it “The Secret” and he would take people to it and show them. The little piece had become a special thing in the community. This moment has had an impact on Swoon, telling her that one tiny thing can make an opportunity for connection and can inspire the feeling that maybe there is another world existing around us and that we only need a perception shift in order to see it. She has since tried to evoke this in all of her other artwork. Originally she believed her series of portraits would be a two-month project but she has continued to make them for over ten years.

Living in New York City had a great impact on her as an artist. She loved its landscape with the graffiti and the layers and the overall impute of people. She wanted to interact with the layers of the city, what she describes as “the naturally occurring collage of the city”. Her first series of prints were done on tracing paper so that the colors of the walls and the chipping paint could still be seen. Her prints tried to create life in what would be an otherwise dead space .

Caledonia did not begin to tag her art with the name, Swoon, until later into her career. When she started to work, she did it under no name. It was not umtil her ex-boyfriend had a dream about the two of them doing graffiti and running from the police that she got the name Swoon. In his dream, she was writing Swoon on the walls of buildings. Thinking that it was a pretty, Curry started tagging her art with the name. After a few years, she began to gain recognition as Swoon. She found it funny that everyone expected her to be a man. They wanted that “Swoon-guy” to come and do shows in their neighborhoods. This also serves to highlight the disproportionate ratio of men to women in graffiti art. It is often seen as too dangerous and aggressive for women. Swoon was able to find success in an art form usually unwelcoming to others of her sex. However Swoon does acknowledge that her gender provides invisibility from the police while pasting that her male counterparts do not have. Over the years Curry has started to see “Swoon” as an idea. It is a word embodies her belief that creativity combined with dedication can create “cracks in the facades of impossibility and inevitability”.