COURTESY PHOTO
New York visiting artist Swoon, known for her urban landscapes, is working with students on Maui on an exhibit that opens tomorrow night at Hui No'eau Visual Arts Center.
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Street artist shares her gift
MAKAWAO, Maui » Kneeling on a panel of wood on a desk, Baldwin High School senior Nicole Cabebe uses both hands to carve a figure that will be part of an art exhibit featuring international artist Swoon.
"It's just amazing," Cabebe said. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience."
The exhibit, along with an artist reception, starts at 6 p.m. tomorrow at the Hui No'eau Visual Arts Center in Upcountry Maui.
Art pieces will feature woodcut prints by several students as well as Swoon's works.
Swoon is one of the most prolific and well known of New York's new breed of young street artists.
Her works were displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York last year as part of an exhibit featuring 21st-century artists. Using large-format paper cutouts and relief printing on paper, she creates portraits of people in daily life.
For the exhibition on Maui, the scenes are drawn on a panel of Philippine luan wood, then cut in relief. Students used a roller to press the ink into the carved spaces, and a large piece of paper was then pressed against the wooden image to make a block print.
During her two-week residency that began Aug. 7, Swoon has been working with juniors and seniors from Baldwin High School as well as other students. She has been conducting similar workshops in the United States and overseas. Her previous stop was in Bangkok.
Her recent piece done on Maui reflects a personalized urban landscape of Bangkok, of a Malay woman in a pensive pose, draped in a sweeping sarong of images of her urban life, including a high-rise tenement and the people who live there, amid swaths of tasseled power lines.
Swoon, 29, said she started creating urban landscapes about street life during the latter part of her art studies at the Pratt Institute in New York.
"I was sort of looking at a lot of the fine-arts stuff that was happening in New York. I felt like it was kind of boring and alienating, very commercial, and I liked what was happening outside," she said.
"It felt very lively. ... I just felt the collage on the walls outside was more beautiful than many of the things I was seeing inside."
Swoon said street art not only helps to fill the emotional void of alienation and impotency by personalizing the environment, but also creates two-way communication, giving people a voice.
"When you're in the city, you feel everything is built and finished. ... It has an impenetrability," she said.
"I think that a lot of the impulse with street art is the kind of feeling that you can make your own mark, and the citizens of the city can participate."
Swoon said she does not know how to reconcile her urban landscapes with the rural nature of Maui.
"It's not that I have a specific message. ... I am just kind of looking and drawing, and this is a kind of my own chronicle of my life," she said.
While she enjoys her art being hung in museums, she is not about to give up her street art.
"The street posters, for me, that's a life project."