Swoon’s “Submerged Motherlands” fills the Brooklyn Museum’s fifth-floor rotunda (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Brooklyn Museum
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, fifth floor
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Wednesday – Sunday through August 24, $12 ($15 including “Ai Weiwei: According to What?”)
Art Off the Wall: Swoon’s “Submerged Collaborations,” June 12, $15, 6:30
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org
www.facebook.com/SwoonStudio
“Is this insane? Is this dangerous? Should I not do this?” Brooklyn-based artist Caledonia Dance Curry, aka Swoon, asked an engineer when she first began putting together “Submerged Motherlands,” her enormous, environmentally conscious installation at the Brooklyn Museum. Filling much of the institution’s fifth-floor rotunda, the site-specific exhibit features two rickety-looking handmade junk rafts, Alice and Maria, that Swoon constructed using found materials, then sailed in New York waters for “Miss Rockaway Armada” and along Venice’s Grand Canal as part of her “Swimming Cities of Serenissima” project. At the center is a tall tree, made of dense layers of dyed fabric and elaborately detailed white cut-paper leaves, that rises to the rotunda’s seventy-two-foot-high circular skylight. The walls of the room suggest water and submersion, splattered with swoops of blue and green paint applied using fire extinguishers, interacting with light and shadow. “Submerged Motherlands” references climate change, Hurricane Sandy, and Doggerland, the Ice Age-era landmass that connected Great Britain and Europe and was destroyed by a tsunami; it also has conceptual ties to the Konbit Shelter sustainable building project in Haiti begun by Swoon and other artists shortly after the 2010 earthquake, as well as Swoon and art collective Transformazium’s Braddock Tiles community-based microfactory being built in an abandoned church in Pennsylvania. “Submerged Motherlands” also includes a healing gazebo decorated with corrugated cardboard honeycombs and wasp nests, and large-scale prints and drawings that recall Swoon’s wheatpastes, which dotted the streets of the city in recent years; here she depicts mothers and children and taliswomen, from a homeless Buddha figure to a friend breast-feeding to depictions of Swoon’s mother’s life cycle; her drug- and alcohol-addicted mother passed away from lung cancer last year.
There’s a distinctly feminist quality to Swoon’s site-specific installation at the Brooklyn Museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Is it insane and dangerous? Probably, but we’re all the better for Swoon’s having gone ahead with “Submerged Motherlands,” an intimate, compelling, and welcoming exploration of life, death, and rebirth. The exhibition continues through August 24; on June 12, Swoon will participate in “Art Off the Wall: Swoon’s ‘Submerged Collaborations,’” which will include a screening of Flood Tide, Todd Chandler’s fictional film about the “Swimming Cities” project; a talk with Swoon and some of her collaborators; and a silent procession from the auditorium to the installation for a live performance by the Submerged Motherlands Orchestra (consisting of Mirah, Marshall LaCount, Chandler, the band North America, and violinist Chloe Swantner).
With the music magazine she works for facing financial difficulties, longtime rock writer Ellie Klug (Toni Colette) is assigned by her editor, Giles (Oliver Platt), the one story she doesn’t want to cover: the mysterious death of Seattle musician Matthew Smith, who made one highly influential album, then drove his car over a waterfall. The main problem is that the jaded Ellie, who has a penchant for sleeping with her subjects, had a relationship with Matthew, one she wants to keep buried. But soon she is on the road with former fling Charlie (Thomas Haden Church), a straitlaced, wealthy bore who decides to make a documentary about her search. At the same time, Ellie is pursued by singer-songwriter Lucas (Ryan Eggold), a younger man who has the hots for her. When she gets a tip that Matthew might actually still be alive, she has to decide whether holding on to her career is worth dredging up the past. Inspired by cowriter and producer Emily Wachtel’s real life as a singles columnist for the Fairfield County Weekly and a contributing writer for Westport magazine, for which she used the pseudonym Ellie Klug, Lucky Them can’t decide whether it’s Eddie and the Cruisers, Velvet Goldmine, or Almost Famous, resulting in a tedious drama filled with genre clichés and dull, predictable scenes. Even a supposed shock near the end ultimately feels trite and obvious. Haden Church’s character is so ludicrously unbelievable that it drags down the entire film by itself, but he gets no help from the overwrought script, mediocre music, and stagnant direction by Megan Griffiths (Eden, The Off Hours). The film is dedicated to Paul Newman, whose widow, Joanne Woodward, is one of the executive producers; Woodward and Wachtel previously teamed up with director Treva Wurmfeld on the documentary Shepard & Dark. But this disappointing follow-up is more like a vanity project that should never have seen the light of day. Lucky Them opens May 30 at the IFC Center, with Griffiths and Wachtel participating in Q&As Friday night with Ira Glass following the 7:15 screening and Saturday night with Dick Cavett after the 7:15 show and Lauren Hutton after the 9:30 screening.
The husband and wife team of Alexis and Bodine Boling have collaborated on the tender, touching drama Movement + Location, which is appropriately having its world premiere at the Brooklyn Film Festival this week. Director, producer, and cinematographer Alexis and writer, producer, editor, and star Bodine were married in 2009 at BAMcafé and made the film in their home borough of Brooklyn. Bodine plays Kim Getty, a young woman who works for City Hope, an organization that helps feed and house the homeless. Meanwhile, Kim herself is trying to make a home for herself, having returned to Brooklyn from four hundred years in the future. Already hiding the truth from her roommate, Amber (Anna Margaret Hollyman), and work colleague Marcel (Haile Owusu), Kim becomes even more secretive when a pair of cops ask her and Marcel to help runaway teen Rachel (Catherine Missal), who, Kim quickly learns, is also from the future but having trouble adapting to her new surroundings. Kim brings Rachel home with her, and trouble slowly escalates as she considers having a relationship with one of the cops, Rob Sullivan (
