Outer Mission – Swoon

This was done in 2008, and is showing it’s age.  But the elegance of it is worth showing, even in its present state.

Swoon is a street artist originally from Daytona Beach, Florida. She moved to New York City at age nineteen, and specializes in life-size wheatpaste prints and paper cutouts of figures. Swoon, real name Caledonia Dance Curry, studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and started doing street art around 1999.

Swoon’s  paste works depict realistically rendered people, often her friends and family, on the streets in various places around the world. Usually, pieces are pasted on uninhabited locations. Her work is inspired by both art historical and folk sources, ranging from German Expressionist wood block prints to Indonesian shadow puppets.

This piece com­ment­s on the dis­ap­pear­ance of young Mex­i­can women ages 16 – 24; whose disappearances have not only been neglected, but dis­re­garded by Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment officials.  There are many skulls, which may com­ment on the vast amount of girls who have gone miss­ing.  On close inspection you can also see monarch but­ter­flies and feath­ers, sym­bols of flight. Accord­ing to Mex­i­can folk­lore, the but­ter­flies are said to present them­selves as fam­ily mem­bers who have passed on.