While roaming the streets of Brooklyn, NYC, and in particular Red Hook, I encountered something I had never seen before: gorgeous black and white (sometimes with a dash of colour) paper cutouts pasted on red metal plates. The work itself, the combination with the red backgrounds: it blew my mind and I was mesmerized. I went on clicking my camera frantically. I needed to document this work!
Meet the artist: Swoon
As soon as I was back home from my adventures in New York City I decided I needed to find out more about the artist. I learned by googling something like 'paper cut out street artist brooklyn' the artist name of this genius woman was Swoon.
Street artists fascinate me, since they clearly want to be seen but create huge amounts of work that will never be able to be transferred to a museum or the private collection of an art collector. Their motives must be based on something else, varying from delivering a (political) message to simply grow a name.
Swoon, I learned, was a woman who didn't feel like she really 'fitted' in society and wanted to take steps in a different direction. She started creating street art, at first anonymously, but as soon as she (quite literally) 'dreamed up' her name Swoon she started tagging her work that way.
A funny thing I read is people were looking for a man called Swoon and were surprized to find out Swoon was actually a woman. When I walked the streets of Brooklyn in 2014 I actually met a few more female street artists (I must say I met them in daylight though! Coincidence? Or is that safer for women artists?), but generally street artists (still) tend to be men.
Nowadays her name is more known and she even had an exhibition in Brooklyn Museum with a huge piece in 2014.
Meet the art: portraits and decorations
I noticed the amount of detail and attention that is put into every piece: be it the life sized portraits or the more ‘decorational’ pieces. A few of the portraits I found were simply gorgeous:
Often the portraits come with a few decorative shapes:
Like this one:
Meet the art: portraits with a story
I noticed many of the portraits carried details of stories or maybe their personalities or histories are embedded. I love this way of sharing a story of a person or a generation or a group. The individual face helps to relate, the detailed stories helps to zoom out and think about what might be going on somewhere in the world, being it around the corner or far far away.
The first one is of a muslim woman, you immediately notice there's more to see in the portrait than just a face:
Although a gorgeous face it is:
It's the dress or coat where a hint of a place can be seen. A mother and a (her?) boy walking down a street of an unknown place.
More colours added
A few of the pieces of art I found had a bit more colour in them.
There is so much detail in the artwork above I'm not even able to explain what you can see in it. I see many references to industrial history, Brooklyn itself, and art as a whole. I noticed a building site in the following piece. I know gentrification and the influence it has on different immigrant groups living in New York City is a huge discussion, but I can only guess as to if that's the meaning behind the pieces.
In the next piece you can find a clear wink to children's drawings embedded in the piece, while the faces clearly show it's a piece created by Swoon. I'm intrigued by the facial expressions in this one and would love to know more about the background story of the piece. Who are these children? What's their history? The left one is clearly looking too worried for it's age.
The brilliance of Swoon
The brilliancy in the work of Swoon lies in the simple but effective decorative value she adds to the street. The random passerby will simple love the way her work decorates the streets. Do you think it's a coincidence all these pieces were glued on red metal plates? I don't, they match too wel and strengthen one another perfectly.
The more attentive passerby will notice the details of the work and start looking for the stories within the portraits. With this Swoon created something very lasting: her name and craft are extremely recognizable after walking through some of the streets in Red Hook. For those who live here and care for the neighbourhood she created an experience, a sharing of stories, something to be proud of, ponder, talk about with fellow 'Red Hookians'.
I'd love to have her live in my neighbourhood, that's for sure.
Oh, the decorations!
As written above: "The random passerby will simple love the way her work decorates the streets."
Although so far I've focused most on the portraits Swoon glued to the red metal walls in Red Hook, I loved the 'simply decorative' pieces as well. Do you see yourself cut these out of a piece of paper? I remember making paper cut outs when I was a child, but they never reached the level of detail that Swoon gets: very fine lines and simply gorgeous swirly geometry.
I'm jealous and will need to start practicing. A lot, probably. I've never been good with scissors.
Gorgeous cut outs in Black & White
I converted a few of her cutouts pasted on red metal sheets to black & white. I would hang these on my wall without a seconds thought.
These fine-lined pieces ranged from extensive to smaller and lower to the streets. As an artist I would probably love to do this too: challenge people to look at parts of the streets they would otherwise ignore. It's what I personally do as a photographer: take shots of those parts of a place others ignore, forcing people to literally change the way they look.
Paste it everywhere!
Both these decorative and portrait pieces have been glued on the red metal sheets in Red Hook. But I also found a few of her cut outs glued on surfaces that were uneven, broken, heavily influenced by weather and/or age, etcetera. Pasted over old wooden doors, under rain pipes, even on pieces that are moveable.
I love this one: there's a wooden door placed on the streets. It would have been easy to pick this door up and move it somewhere else. But now the artwork is pasted on the wall and partly over the door: would you still move the door, knowing you would tear the paper?
I somehow feel she did this on purpose, as if she wanted to glue the surroundings into the artwork and vice versa.
Last but not least: the goddess Thalassa
The last artwork I'lls hare portrays what Swoon envisions the goddess 'Thalassa' looks like, the 'primeval spirit of the sea'. Almost mermaid-like, she seems to just come out of the water, head up high, a swirl of water in her hands.
Elegant,
Strong,
Gorgeous.
According to Wikipedia on Thalassa:
Gaius Julius Hyginus described her in the preface to his Fabulae as daughter of Aether and Hemera (Fab. Praef., 2). With her male counterpart Pontus, she spawned the storm gods and the tribes of fish. The couple were later replaced by the other marine pairs, Oceanus and Tethys, Poseidon and Amphitrite. Nevertheless, fables were devoted to her by Aesop and she was to be depicted in both artistic and literary works during the Common Era.
I took a second picture of the artwork, focusing on her belly and chest, because a lot of detail was drawn in those parts of her body. Her lungs, some sea horses, intestines, cob webs, and some shells and other sea creatures are what I can distinguish in the colourful play with lines.
Although many of the works I shared with you by Swoon are gorgeous, this is one I would love to buy an original piece of and hang on my walls. It's a strong figure, well-detailed and decorated, I simply love every part of it. The longer you look at the whole piece the more you distinguish in it.
Also:
Basically I just read and learned from a Wikipedia article on mythology just because I once walked the streets of New York City and found a gorgeous picture. Why again are we often removing street art from our buildings?
It's pretty hard to put an end to this essay as I love the work so much that I want to keep adding pictures and words. I'm incredibly glad that I have had the opportunity as a European to visit NYC and get even as far off the grid as Red Hook so I could see this art and 'collect' it on my camera. Cheers Swoon, I hope you're still awesome and making lots of art, I'll be back to document it one day!
This is a 'Showcase Sunday' post, re-edited and partially rewritten from the following three posts: