A good way to familiarize oneself with the additional dimensions that Swoon has taken on since you last caught up with her is the Street Artists show called To Accompany Something Invisible newly exhibited at Allouche Gallery in New York.

Swoon. “Sasu and Kasey”. To Accompany Something Invisible. Allouche Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Whether it’s Edline or Moni or Dawn and Gemma who you came to see again, freshly colored and framed in mandella-ed ships or modest rectangular rafts, these living ghosts greet you on gallery walls, silent and familiar as you have become with them on city walls. On wood or on butcher paper, you are never far from the author or her subjects, even as they are flowered and leaved and ribboned and swagged and cut so that the light passes through organic and ornate patterning.

Swoon. To Accompany Something Invisible. Allouche Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Swoon’s process is here on display; drawing sketches, sometimes just outlines of ideas later detailed and drawn intricately and hand cut into linoleum. These are her hand-rendered personal journeys.

Now actually building walls with those same hands in Haiti for people to shelter within, Swoon is also readying works to display on walls at a major retrospective this autumn at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center.  The invisible something may be the stories told and heard during the last twenty years of Swoon’s journey, voices that can be heard if you care to listen.

Swoon. The original sketch for Edline. To Accompany Something Invisible. Allouche Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Invisible are your friendships, the lovers, the worries, the experiments, the artists milieu, the early shows in Brooklyn neighborhoods that now are transformed; reassuring and warm voices now glimmering in the buzz of an opening, like this one tonight here in the Meatpacking District – a neighborhood itself rife with the stories of people whom you first met on the street.

We stopped by the Allouche Gallery yesterday to catch a glimpse of Swoon’s magic world as she was preparing for her exhibition opening today. Here are a few process shots, as proper lighting was not yet in place and Swoon and her assistants were busy helping her build new environments.

Swoon. Detail of Edline in an environment created in an installation box. To Accompany Something Invisible. Allouche Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Swoon. Detail. To Accompany Something Invisible. Allouche Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Swoon. Detail of Yaya and Sonia . To Accompany Something Invisible. Allouche Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Swoon. Ben. To Accompany Something Invisible. Allouche Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Swoon. Detail. To Accompany Something Invisible. Allouche Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Swoon’s To Accompany Something Invisible opens today at the Allouche Gallery in Manhattan. It is free and open to the plublic. Click HERE for details.

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