Artwork Description
Swoon – Sasu and Kasei
Dimensions: 83 x 64 x 13″
Year: 2017
Medium: block print, acrylic gouache, hand cut paper on wood
Sasu and Kasei is an exploration of what it means to nurture another human being, as explored in the bond between a mother and a child. It is universal, unconditional love and acceptance. While Swoon’s own mother had abandoned her and her sister when they were young due to addiction, Swoon has explored her feelings of trauma through her art, coming out the other side to a space of acceptance and compassion.
This work was a finalist in the Outwin Bouchever Portrait Competition, toured U.S museums., appeared in the Finland Triennial in 2023, and was featured in the Swoon retrospective at the Taubman Museum of Art.
This work is unique in its three dimensional composition, with multiple layers of visual imagery.
Caledonia Curry, whose work appears under the name Swoon, is a Brooklyn-based artist and is widely known as the first woman to gain large-scale recognition in the male-dominated world of street art. Callie took to the streets of New York while attending the Pratt Institute of Art in 1999, pasting her paper portraits to the sides of buildings with the goal of making art and the public space of the city more accessible.
In a moment when contemporary art often holds a conflicted relationship to beauty, Callie’s work carries with it an earnestness, treating the beautiful as sublime even as she explores the darker sides of her subjects. Her work has become known for marrying the whimsical to the grounded, often weaving in slivers of fairy-tales, scraps of myth, and a recurring motif of the sacred feminine. Tendrils of her own family history—and a legacy of her parents’ struggles with addiction and substance abuse—recur throughout her work.
While much of Callie’s art plays with the fantastical, there is also a strong element of realism. This can be seen in her myriad social endeavors, including a long-term community revitalization project in Braddock, Pennsylvania and her efforts to build earthquake-resistant homes in Haiti through Konbit Shelter. Her non-profit, the Heliotrope Foundation, was created in order to further support these ventures.
Today, Callie’s work can be found on the sides of buildings worldwide and has been given both permanent and transient homes in more classical institutions, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Tate Modern, and the São Paulo Museum of Art. Most recently, she has begun using film animation to explore the boundaries of visual storytelling.
Sasu is a fellow artist and friend of Swoon. She visited Sasu in her home in Tokyo shortly after the birth of her first son, Kasei. In the imagery, Swoon captures the quiet tenderness of Sasu carrying her son from the bath. It reflects a period in which Sasu tries to understand her new identity as an artist and mother. A tension present in the lives of many creative women.