Contemporary Art in the Louisville Area: Swoon, The Canyon: 1999-2017

Savannah Ferrell

A485 Contemporary Art

Revised Exhibition Review

12 October 2017

The Canyon: 1999-2017

Spanning from 1999 to 2017, the body of work from Caledonia Curry aka “Swoon” is enchanting, endearing, and sublime. The Canyon, her exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati opened on September 22, 2017 with an overwhelming turnout. The Canyon displays Curry’s first ever retrospective exhibition, visiting sections of her art career from the very beginning to the present. It highlights her career in specific sections throughout the exhibition. First is work from her early years, when she studied at the Pratt Institute, made woodblock and linocut prints from anonymous portraits of street-goers, and worked as a wheatpaste street artist. Then the viewer is brought to her middle years where she began to use portraits of people she knew and brought more personal meaning and pain into her body of work. Finally, the viewer comes to her later projects where she worked (and continues to work) primarily in community outreach programs, global ventures for human rights and civic revitalization in addition to her gallery shows. In this way, this retrospective really shows how Curry has grown from a student-artist, interested mainly in observing and recreating, to a professional artist interested in making change in the world using her art.

This exhibition is separated into several different installations. The first floor is a chronological timeline from her earliest work as an art student to her more intimate works. The second floor houses her collaborative and global works. This setup makes for a very successful retrospective show because it guides viewers in a logical sense and allows them to get to know the artist and her body of work. The first section of this timeline is called Time Capsule. (Curry, 1999-2017) This installation takes up about three quarters of the first floor in the exhibition, is then split into four chronologically respective sections, and spans from the year 1999 to the present. The entire installation is made up of her work wheatpasted directly onto the walls, mirroring the street art technique that she has worked with since the beginning of her career. There are parts of an early raft project that she built in collaboration with other artists that are re-constructed into the gallery space to represent those early collaborative works and to allow for more space to paste work on. (Figure 1) She and her collaborators made these rafts out of garbage and used them to sail down the Hudson River, demonstrating that you can do a lot with reused and recycled items.

The quality of her work is impeccable. Her wheatpasted figures are surrounded by intricate paper cutouts and wallpapers displaying the detail Curry places in her work. She chose to display linoleum and wood blocks in certain spaces and viewers are free to touch them. The attention to detail in her carvings is just astounding. She works in a very sketchy, line-driven fashion, giving her figures an added dimension of depth and life. This coupled with the intricate patterns adorning her figures demonstrate her raw talent as an artist.

Curry’s earliest work was made from sketches and photographs of people she saw in the street that caught her attention. She worked from people she saw in the subway, people she saw in other countries, but (usually, save for her first ever full-length figure which was her grandfather) never people that she knew personally. She wanted to capture something special in these anonymous people, and to cross-section them with the cityscapes that she saw them in. Most of her figures from this time have structures built into the bottom portions of their bodies, and they are full-size and positioned at floor level to create an intimate experience with the figure. (Figure 1) These people bring urban spaces to life because they are the life of the city. The next parts of Time Capsule show Curry growing into her shoes as an artist more. She chooses more intimate subjects and themes such as friends of hers and later includes painful personal memories of abuse and addiction in her family, which is explored in detail in other sections of the exhibition. At the end of this installation, Curry injects global meaning into her work with Thalassa. (2011) This piece is a huge-scale modernized portrait of the mythological being from Aesop’s fable, “The Farmer and the Sea,” commenting on humanity’s complacency in the earth’s destruction. For this reason, Thalassa can be seen as a monument in the show’s timeline representing Curry’s movement into work that is more involved in the preservation and sustainment of the community, locally and globally.

On the second floor of the exhibition viewers can see Curry’s community-based work and collaborative projects with artists around the world. Curry is a very active person globally, working with people around the world to revitalize their communities using art. Many of these projects involve teaching individuals or communities how to make art for funding and providing art therapy programs for people affected by tragedies such as rape and addiction. The projects affect people from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Meru, Kenya to Lund, Sweden. In 2015, Curry founded the Heliotrope Foundation, a non-profit organization aimed at helping people who have been affected by natural or social disaster. This organization works in a few different ongoing projects, including Konbit Shelter.

“Konbit,” is a word describing a traditional form of cooperative labor in Haiti where able-bodied people help others with their farming. This project was initiated in 2010 after the devastating earthquake with the goal of providing disaster-resistant shelter and long-standing community and global bonds. Curry joined a group of artists, engineers, architects, educators and the community of Cormiers, Haiti (Komye) to build shelters in the Super-Adobe style, developed by Nadir Khalili to be completely earthquake, tornado, flood, and fire resistant. The team shared new skills with each other and created new jobs in the community, promoting education and productivity. Curry and her fellow artists and community members decorated their shelters with art that they made, echoing her original figures and patterns. The shelters themselves are 10% concrete and 90% earth, making them eco-friendly as well. This project has since developed into a long-standing relationship between communities as the group has returned and worked with them. Konbit Shelter has also created a clean stove project, partnered with local craftspeople to sell their art for funding and additional housing construction using bamboo, and started an arts-based afterschool program for children ages 3-18 in Cormiers. Curry shows the fruits of the Konbit labor through an installation on the second floor, simply called Konbit (2010-ongoing) Konbit is made up of models of the structures, photographs mounted on the wall showing the work process and the people involved, a video screen with headphones documenting the process and a bound artist book of printed photographs from the project. (Figures 2-3)

The Canyon is very successful in showing Callie Curry’s growth as an artist. It clearly shows her emerging as a primitive artist, observing and copying, making anonymous portraits and working mainly in the street, to making works of her friends and memories, painful or not, and working on huge, collaborative and humanitarian projects such as her early raft projects and her later Konbit Shelter initiative. The quality of her work only grows too, as her sketchiness remains but becomes more refined and clarified in her later works. She works with more colors and patterns now than she used to, and it is clear to me that she feels more comfortable and established in her art now than she did when she started, which is probably why she does so much outreach work. Overall, this exhibition was stimulating, interesting, and even overwhelming to see in person. Curry’s subject matter spans such a large field and her work is done on such a detailed and huge scale. It will always be exciting to see what she does next.