MESA, Ariz. — Behind a saturated blue gallery wall, eight portraits by Brooklyn-based artist Caledonia Curry, also known as Swoon, transform the stark white walls of a small exhibition space inside Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum in Arizona, creating an intimate encounter with pieces that signal the expansive history and reach of the artist’s creative practice.
Gift in the Rupture conveys the emotional architecture inherent in Swoon’s extensive more than two-decade body of work, though lacking the complex layers of storytelling and elaborate mixed-media materials prevalent in her previous monumental works. This range includes her early clandestine wheat paste street art, sculptural junk rafts used to crash the 2009 Venice Biennale, elaborate sculptures supporting guided meditation, stop-gap animation informed by psychedelic-assisted therapy, and more.
Entering the gallery, one immediately encounters Swoon’s towering 2022 block-print portrait “Thalassa,” depicting the primordial sea goddess of Greek mythology rising from the ocean adorned with a crab and other creatures that suggest human connections to the natural world. The portrait pulls viewers into Swoon’s world, where history and mythology freely ebb and flow, rupturing and shaping the futures of human bodies and landforms, and where women are central to healing journeys both individual and collective.
Curated by Santa Fe-based gallerist Tonya Turner Carroll, the exhibition includes several other figures that recur in Swoon’s work, most rendered through block prints on mylar or found objects. With “Edline” (2018), for example, the artist depicts a student in Haiti holding a hand puppet created during the ongoing Konbit Shelter project initiated by Swoon. It shares a wall with two additional artworks — a mythological portrayal of artist, collaborator, and muse Monica Canilao and a portrait of two poets and street artists in an embrace in “Alixa and Naima” (2023), calling to the intersections of creativity, community, and collaboration at the heart of Swoon’s work.
Collectively, these pieces position doors as metaphors for leaving behind past traumas and entering healing spaces, while also suggesting the choices necessary to make these transitions. Two doors bearing portraiture of creative allies and friends suggest the role that strong bonds with fellow artists have played as Swoon works through her childhood experiences with family addiction, but also the ways that art has vastly expanded the depth and breadth of her personal journey.
Across the gallery, two more portraits affirm the artist’s facility for integrating portraiture with built environments, particularly those that speak to colonial histories and power structures. With “Girl from Ranoon Province 4” (2023), a silkscreen and hand-painted gouache portrait on wood sourced from a handmade boat, Swoon sets a girl atop an edifice of stairs, power lines, and a house on stilts, where a window shows passengers on an underground train. Small marks made by ocean life dot the surface of the natural canvas, suggesting the interdependence of all life with its implications for climate change, economic justice, and more.
In “Cairo” (2023), a block print with hand painting on coffee-stained mylar, streetscapes form a woman’s torso and lower body, as if she constructs her identity from memories of place or seeks to move beyond the cultural mores imbued in the city’s design. In a lower corner, a woman wearing a pink head covering walks with a child, just steps from the edge of the frame. On one level, these pieces speak to Swoon’s extensive travels. On another, they address the body as a landscape, pointing to the interplay of social customs and design and the elaborate emotional and psychic structures we make and carry in our daily lives.
Nearby is “Paulie” (2023), another recurring figure in Swoon’s work, whose gesture suggests that she is literally opening her heart. Several snakes traversing the woman’s torso leave viewers to consider their many meanings, whether culled from personal experience, cultural knowledge, or art historical references. In ancient Greek mythology, for example, snakes are affiliated with Asclepius, the god of medicine and healing. Given the significance of snakes within Diné (Navajo), Hopi, and other Indigenous cultures in the region, I wished the artist had been commissioned to create site-specific work, thinking of how she might render the lines of the endemic Saguaro cactus or explore the myths of the Southwest that ascribe personhood to this majestic plant.
This small sampling of Swoon’s creative practice only begins to address the complexities of her work and the autobiography that informs it. Indeed, there’s a particular wonderment that ensues from experiencing Swoon’s artworks within a monumental installation, as in her 2014 Submerged Motherlands exhibition for the Brooklyn Museum. But that doesn’t limit the significance of the works featured here, which serve as intriguing signposts for those who want to explore her work further. The quietude and intimate scale of this exhibition allow more time to study the artist’s intricate linework up close, and sit with the stories she’s threaded together into a compelling worldview.
All that being said, it’s impossible to separate this exhibition from the context in which it’s being shown. The introductory wall text for the exhibition suggests that Gift in the Rupture “speaks to what can happen when we harness our innate strength and transform our pain into beauty.” Yet the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum is marked by tangible ruptures following the city’s efforts to censor Shepard Fairey’s “My Florist is a Dick” (2019), which depicts a police officer holding a nightstick with a flower blooming from its end, and subsequent postponement of four solo shows on street art and activism, including Swoon’s. The museum galleries that would have housed two Native artists’ exhibitions, originally slated to coincide with Gift in the Rupture, now sit devoid of their work. Swoon’s mythological exploration of healing only heightens the feeling that none of it is happening here.
Swoon: Gift in the Rupture continues at Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum at the Mesa Arts Center (1 East Main Street, Mesa, Arizona) through January 14, 2024. The exhibition was curated by Tonya Turner Carroll.
