WHAT:“Swoon: Submerged Motherlands”
WHEN: April 11-August 24, 2014
WHERE: Brooklyn Museum, Iris and Gerald B. Cantor Gallery, 5th Floor, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn
WHY THIS SHOW MATTERS: On the fifth floor of the Brooklyn Museum, rising from the remnants of lean-to’s that were once boats, a 60-foot tree made of dyed cloth and adorned with delicately cut paper leaves towers over the proceedings. The huge, technically complex construction — for which the artist enlisted the help of an engineer — is a new work by the Brooklyn-based artist Swoon (born Caledonia Dance Curry) for her solo exhibition “Submerged Motherlands.” Inspired by the Hurricane Sandy’s devestation of low-lying neighborhoods in New York and by Doggerland, a once-populated landmass off the coast of Britain that was flooded by rising sea levels some 8,000 years ago, the exhibition explores social change in the wake of environmental disaster.
The show combines Swoon’s signature figurative works on paper, cut and drawn by hand, with retired boats left over from her 2009 project “Swimming Cities of Serenissima,” in which the artist and a crew of 28 people sailed from Slovenia to the Venice Biennale on structures made from found materials. Also on view are site-specific elements like a small and intimate gazebo, its exterior covered with drawings and cut paper that chronicle the life of the artist’s late mother, its inside furnished with benches and an intricate honey-comb ceiling made of cardboard and paper butterflies and lizards.
The show’s various pieces come together to create a fantastical vision, an answer of sorts to troubling questions raised by the artist about the fate of civilization in an age of climate change. “Submerged Motherlands” presents a surreal world of possibilities, seen most clearly in her once-floating boat habitats, while reflecting on the losses brought on by nature and life cycles. With the walls of the rotunda spray-painted a deep aquamarine nearly to the top, the installation creates the powerful sense of submersion beneath a tidal surge, giving visitors a taste of life under water.
To see pictures of Swoon’s “Submerged Motherlands” installation, click the slide show here.
