The Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea project set sail from Troy, NY, last Friday! 7 rafts will sail down the Hudson River, ending up in New York City. The New York Times did a nice profile which you can read here. For now, here’s a small clip from the article.
“It is because of Swoon that this collection of artists, carpenters, musicians, filmmakers, seafarers and hangers-on was here. For the past year she has been preparing for this project, a floating trip that will take the group down the Hudson, from Troy through the harbor of New York to Long Island City, Queens, where the fleet will dock at the Deitch Studios and remain stationed as part of an exhibition beginning Sept. 7.
The project, “Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea,” Swoon’s latest large-scale work, is part floating artwork, part performance, part mobile utopia and seemingly part summer camp for grown-up artsy kids. For the work Swoon, 30, collaborated with musicians from the Minneapolis band Dark Dark Dark; the writer Lisa D’Amour, who contributed a play to be performed at stops along the way; the musician Sxip Shirey; and a host of others.
In the summers of 2006 and ’07 Swoon, known primarily as a street artist, did a similar project, “Miss Rockaway Armada,” in which she and a group of artists boated down the Mississippi on a large flotilla. It was essentially an experiment in communal life, and while many who took part are involved in “Swimming Cities,” the new work is more focused on the aesthetic aspect of the vessels.
Swoon said she began thinking about this voyage while working on the Mississippi trip. “From the first piece of plywood that we collected for the Rockaway, I knew that I would do this,” she said a week before the launching, sitting on the dock near the Deitch outpost in Long Island City. Her red hair was pulled back from her face, and she was wearing a tank top, with black paint splattered across her shoulders, sea gulls squawking in the background. “The ‘Rockaway’ was this kind of experiment in all kinds of ideals,” she said. “And working collectively has its own beauties and nightmares, and so does working by yourself. I just thought I wanted a chance to take some of the same kinds of language of the ‘Rockaway’ and make it more of a guided artistic experience rather then a collective living experiment. I wanted to make something which really had the freedom of artistic expression, sculptural and aesthetic and all that stuff.”
