Trading New England temperatures on the precipice of freezing for their friendlier equivalent in the Midwest, I found myself in Detroit’s Library Street Collective Gallery.
Detroit in a physical sense is in a state of odd flux, a remaking of sorts, bearing in mind the pulse of a deep cultural legacy. Within this contradiction, for better or worse, the contemporary art world has taken note. At the risk of waxed poetic generalizations, I feel unqualified to comment further, only a passerby in a city ground through heavy post-industrial change, except to say that within its city, the Library Street Collective Gallery seemed a fitting location for Swoon’s The Light After, which seeks to explore the connection between physically felt sensation and persistent emotion.
The exhibition is intended as an exploration of “empathetic death experiences,” a type of phenomenon where grief is transmutable into a kind of clairvoyance, a mourner feeling an impossible togetherness with a loved one passing on. Conceived as a portrayal of the artist’s own empathetic death experience following the passing of her mother, the exhibition centers its artistic questions on what is simultaneously visceral and unexplainable, the human propensity to feel immensely, without the comfort of a clear narrative. Swoon’s work lies in a liminal space between gauzy, heavenly imagery, and the pock-marked, imperfect everyday. It’s hardly political, but in many ways, its brilliant-hued portraiture is revolutionary.
The gallery space serves its purpose in producing an immersive, enveloping experience of the installations. The paper cutting adornments surrounding the figures that compose the installation provide a sensation of otherworldliness, a kind of careful detail and decorativeness that a visitor could marvel at purely for the aesthetic care taken to produce them. Swoon’s detail is an architectural marvel, the installation’s figures portrayed in golden realism, jutting bones, spiderwebbed veins and caged organs are integrated with geometric bursts of color, as alive as installations can be.
Visitors also find themselves amongst figures of goddesses, careful observers of the magical realism of a kind of afterlife, the manifestations of ancient explanations to universal questions made new again in the headspace that Swoon portrays. Swoon’s depictions are colored with detail, a kind of transcendental calm, a sense of the diminutiveness of the body and the infinite worlds it contains. Though her installations are frozen in place, they feel like a soft repudiation of more traditional representations of physical beauty, psychedelic in detail, populated with knowing, untroubled expressiveness.
The crux of this exhibition is its ability to impress the spiritual and the physical against each other, a moving exploration of body and soul, and the indeterminability of the boundaries between either. It’s a larger philosophical exercise beyond its heavy, personal roots, and an enormously impressive visual achievement.
All photographs are by Sal Rodriguez, courtesy of Library Street Gallery.
