Only minutes before their launching, on Friday around noon, a group of people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, was still preparing for the voyage down the Hudson River. In between bites of jelly doughnuts, the crew, dressed in hipster hillbilly chic, hustled to clean up pieces of scrap metal and ready the boats. In the middle stood the artist known as Swoon in a bright yellow rain poncho and jeans.
It is because of Swoon that this collection of artists, carpenters, musicians, filmmakers, seafarers and hangers-on was here. For the past year she has been preparing for this project, a floating trip that will take the group down the Hudson, from Troy through the harbor of New York to Long Island City, Queens, where the fleet will dock at the Deitch Studios and remain stationed as part of an exhibition beginning Sept. 7.
The project, “Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea,” Swoon’s latest large-scale work, is part floating artwork, part performance, part mobile utopia and seemingly part summer camp for grown-up artsy kids. For the work Swoon, 30, collaborated with musicians from the Minneapolis band Dark Dark Dark; the writer Lisa D’Amour, who contributed a play to be performed at stops along the way; the musician Sxip Shirey; and a host of others.
In the summers of 2006 and ’07 Swoon, known primarily as a street artist, did a similar project, “Miss Rockaway Armada,” in which she and a group of artists boated down the Mississippi on a large flotilla. It was essentially an experiment in communal life, and while many who took part are involved in “Swimming Cities,” the new work is more focused on the aesthetic aspect of the vessels
AP
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