Junk Makes for Treasures Untold in Brooklyn Exhibition

“Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea,” an exhibition by Brooklyn-based street artist Swoon, reminds me of two things: Johnny Depp and a repressively Catholic French village. For those who are not avid fans of romantic films, I am referring to Chocolat.

In the film, Depp stars as Roux, the mysteriously appealing leader of a band of gypsies. Roux and his comrades live in a floating city—a collection of brightly colored ragtag barges that they use to travel along a river from small town to small town. Swoon’s “Swimming Cities,” currently docked in the East River in front of the gallery Deitch Studios in Long Island City, not only bear an uncanny resemblance to these gypsy ships, but also create a similar aura of resourceful and self-sustaining wanderers. While Chocolat provides fictional images of stand-alone nomads, “Swimming Cities” is the real deal.

Swoon and her friends and collaborators built the seven ships in the exhibition by hand. The only building materials used were scraps—warped wood, torn curtains, rusting tractor parts, and hundreds of other individually useless items. The ships represent the transformation of the contents of a junkyard into structures that are beautiful and whimsical in addition to being seaworthy. One vessel uses intricately carved latticework and large plywood rosettes painted white, red, orange, and heather grey to decorate a refurbished and now fully-functioning steam engine. Another ship, which is really more of a raft with a pyramid on top, has a built-in staircase leading to a pirate-style crow’s nest. This fantastical structure is, amazingly, mechanically sound—it is comfortably supported on a platform buoyed by empty industrial-sized cans of cooking oil.

These “floating sculptures,” as they are referred to in the official press release about the exhibition, are most impressive when one learns about their journey to the city—an approximately 100-mile-long trek down the Hudson from upstate New York. Swoon, 40 of her friends and fellow artists, and several engineers (attention SEAS kids with artistic ambitions) piloted the ships during the three-week journey.

The successful navigation of this floating city composed entirely of recycled materials makes one think twice before condemning something to a trash can. “Swimming Cities” is extreme, but the project begs an investigation into just how far recycled materials could go in an everyday context. If a loose collective of artists can create a successful fleet of ships from scrap, what can the New York City government do with all the bottles and newspapers New Yorkers throw into bright blue recycling bins every day?

“Swimming Cities” not only reminded me of the gypsy Johnny Depp, but also of the very traditional French village in which he arrives about an hour into Chocolat. The film capitalizes on the juxtaposition of the liberated gypsies and the repressed townspeople. Similarly, Swoon exploits the contrast between her colony of cobbled-together boats and the larger-than-life collection of skyscrapers that sits less than a mile away across the East River. The image of a sail made of torn bed sheets set against the massive steel-and-glass New York skyline is a powerful one that causes on to question things beyond the efficiency of the city’s recycling programs. Manhattan seems excessive and overwhelming when contrasted with “Swimming Cities.”

The project was partly inspired by Swoon’s worries about rising waters and floods, and she explores images of a post-deluge dystopia in a related exhibition inside Deitch Studios. One does not, however, have to look inside the gallery to get the morbid sense that in the event of an environmental crisis, the somewhat flimsy-looking ships might fare better than the behemoth structures nearby.

Ultimately, this experiment leads the viewer to understand that there must be a compromise. There is a successful and sustainable lifestyle that falls somewhere between living in an East Side penthouse where the lights are on all the time and taking up residence on a pseudo-pirate-ship made out of the stuff your grandmother recently discovered in the back of her garage.

Greenwald is a Columbia College sophomore majoring in art history. Her column focuses on environmental art in New York City.