Opening celebration: Friday May 15, 4–6pm. Artist will be present and giving readings from her Sibylant Sisters oracle deck.
Santa Fe Art Institute talk and Sibylant Sisters film screening: Thursday May 14, 5:30-6:30pm
For the last few years, Swoon has been working on her most intimate story and set of characters yet: Sibylant Sisters. This autobiographical, multidimensional artwork is immersive and vulnerable, and portrays a magical story set in her childhood through drawing, painting, an oracle deck, and a stop motion film. The artist presents her story so that others can find healing the way she did, over years of “making the subconscious conscious” by exploring her parents’ opioid addictions through magical realism. Artwork from Sibylant Sisters will be the focus of Into the Forest.
Swoon, nom de artiste of Brooklyn-based Caledonia Dance Curry, uses storytelling and the creative process as a method of recovery. She became well known as a street artist in New York City with her large-scale wheatpastes of characters in her life, a practice which she expanded internationally from Thailand to Tunisia to Haiti. Curry is now included in numerous top museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Mima Museum in Brussels and the Tate in London.
The event that launched Swoon to fame occurred in 2009, when she sailed unannounced into the Venice Biennale on a series of homemade rafts handbuilt by her and her fellow artists. This project, called “Swimming Cities of Serenissima,” was a living community that made the impossible feel possible. It was also, according to Art Critic Jerry Salz, “The most moving moment [he] had at the Biennale.” Salz continued, “Swoon’s work doesn’t come out of academic critique; it comes from necessity and vision. These are the perfect tools for making things as old as time new again — including an art world turned dangerously into itself.” Below, you can see the Swimming Cities raft with Swoon at the front, along with two artworks from the original raft (masthead and doors) that Turner Carroll is honored to present to collectors.
Swoon has since created many other immersive projects with “necessity and vision,” including a refurbished church in Bradford, Pennsylvania which trained its community members in professional crafts and a nail salon which gave manicures to homeless citizens of New York to encourage humanization and joy.
One of the most exciting projects we are debuting at Turner Carroll Gallery during Swoon: Into the Forest this May is her Sibylant Sisters oracle deck. We will feature both the deck and the original artwork from the cards for the very first time. As the artist writes,
“The Sibylant Sisters Oracle cards are a work of art you hold in your hands. They are a tool for storytelling and self reflection. Based in the magical world of the Sibylant Sisters fairytale, they offer its symbols and characters as guides for your own mythical journey.”
Other exciting components of Swoon’s Into the Forest will include rare, unique, and highly collectible paintings and drawings which are making their gallery debut, and which came to us directly from the Wyoming Museum of Art.
Before the opening on May 15, please join us at a supporting event on May 14 at the Santa Fe Art Institute. This public reception will occur from 5:30-6:30pm, and Swoon will talk about her new body of work and storytelling as a throughline in her artistic practice. Her newest film about the Sibylant Sisters, which won two Sundance Film Festival fellowships, will also be premiered.