Caledonia Curry - Swoon
Seven Contemplations
Albright-Knox Northland, Buffalo, NY
Through January 10, 2021
Albright-Knox Northland presents Seven Contemplations, by CALEDONIA CURRY (American, born 1977), who works under the name SWOON.
Caledonia Curry is a New York City–based artist who has achieved international acclaim for her immersive installations, community-based projects, and intricate portraits wheat-pasted on city streets. Her work is widely recognized for advancing the conceptual and formal limits of public artwork, following her vision for art as a catalyst for social transformation and healing.
Swoon’s site-specific installation at Albright-Knox Northland builds on 20 years of works created in response to the architecture, scale, and spontaneous interactions of the urban landscape. Seven Contemplations is a monumental exhibition that reimagines every surface of the cavernous 8,000-square-foot space with block-print portraits, paper-cut patterns, and sculptural forms that echo the cacophonous layers of the city, the undulating forms of the natural world, and the awe-inspiring expanse of the cosmos with fabric, paper, and found objects.
Seven Contemplations evokes the transcendent sensory and visual experience Caledonia Curry has become known for in her major installations, and also imagines a new way to engage with the idea of transformation by asking viewers to turn inward. When entering the space, individuals are invited to participate in a self-guided viewing experience inspired by the artist’s contemplative meditation practice. All seven large-scale works in the exhibition are accompanied by written prompts leading the viewer in a structured, fixed-gaze meditation. The prompts respond to the visual components of each sculpture with profound questions about our shared human condition that touch on love, loss, grief, transformation, suffering, and forgiveness.
Caledonia Curry began a daily meditation practice six years ago while struggling with the trauma of growing up in a family affected by opioid addiction. Meditation offered a space to simply be within her own body and consciousness, undoing the dissociative responses she learned as a way to manage a painful upbringing and ultimately leading to shifts in awareness that generated healing. Through sharing this experience with others as part of a public art installation, she hopes to provide space not only for individual growth, but also collective healing. As communities face simultaneous crises caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the subsequent economic downturn, and a national reckoning with police brutality, she believes self-compassion and compassion for others learned through meditation are critical to achieving the social justice envisioned by liberation movements.
The works in the exhibition include Thalassa, Medea, Tree of Life, Dawn and Gemma, Memento Mori, Cosmos, and Cicada. Thalassa, one of Swoon’s most recognizable works, was originally commissioned by the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2011. The 12-foot-tall linoleum block print was inspired by the Greek goddess of the sea rising triumphantly out of the water in a powerful, protective stance imagined in response to the horror of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In this iteration, Thalassa asks us, ”Who were you before you were born?”
Medea is a sculpture and sound installation that visually centers around the portrait of a home that is splitting apart. Caledonia Curry looks through time at the intergenerational trauma passed on by women in her family, confronting her deepest fears and prompting viewers to consider the emotions that dislocate us from our bodies. Dawn and Gemma and Memento Mori come together in a single sculpture that considers the cycle of birth and death. Cicada, Swoon’s first stop-motion animation, considers the incremental transformations that elude detection and lead us towards self-realization. Cosmos asks us to feel ourselves within the fabric of a universe much bigger than we are.
Tree of Life, the central sculpture of the exhibition, greets viewers as they enter Albright-Knox Northland’s main hall. The sculpture’s canopy stretches nearly 30 feet across, with a cascade of hand-cut paper tendrils and hand-dyed fabric branches and roots. At the center of the trunk is a spring of flowing water. In response to this sculpture, Caledonia Curry asks us to consider the miracle of life that is given to us freely with each breath we take, and how this gift enables us to transform ourselves and the world in which we live.
CALEDONIA CURRY, or SWOON, is recognized around the world for her pioneering vision of public artwork. Caledonia Curry’s gallery and museum exhibitions are deeply influenced by her activism and community projects outside of traditional gallery spaces. She has founded and led multiple collaborative projects that use art to respond to crisis. These include Konbit Shelter, in response to the 2011 earthquake in Haiti; Music Boxin response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2011; Braddock Tiles in response to the economic crisis in Braddock, Pennsylvania; and The Road Home in collaboration with Philadelphia Mural Arts and the Million Person Project in response to the opioid epidemic in North Philadelphia. She is also known for her floating sculptures and experimental living projects on water that include The Miss Rockaway Armada (Mississippi River); Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea (Hudson River); and the Swimming Cities of Serenissima (Adriatic Sea), which crashed the 2009 Venice Biennale. In 2015 she founded the Heliotrope Foundation to support her social justice projects.
Caledonia Curry has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in major museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Skissernas Museum, Lund, Sweden; MIMA Contemporary Art Museum, Brussels, Belgium; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Oaxaca, Mexico. Her first museum retrospective was The Canyon: 1999–2017 at the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati. Her work is held in public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA).
ALBRIGHT-KNOX NORTHLAND
612 Northland Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14211
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