Via the OntheCommons.org blog and their guest blogger Don Russell of Provisions Library in Washington, DC I encountered Swoon, a 30-something New York Street artist who mixes up graffiti and decollage. The New York Times has a wonderful audio slideshow of her work that can be found in alleyways and intimate side-streets across the city. Melodically textured, multi-leveled work that combines the characteristics of a particular place - a steel door off a loading dock say - with whimsy and people she has encountered, Swoon creates these wonderful ghost-like characters. Almost like vignettes from a building’s memory, what it saw once on that spot. A kid playing ball, a cyclist riding past. A young woman glancing idly into space. These are the snapshots that comprise the bulk of our acquired visual impressions of life. Swoon gives them a place, releases them into our shared memory known as cities.

In reading more about Swoon on the gammablog site, I encountered the term “decollage,” which refers to a process of stripping away paper from a surface, creating textures, revealing colors, adding layers of affect to surfaces. In a way this is what nature itself does to the layers of posters, bills, fliers, paint and other material that is slathered across the canvass of urban street life. Sun-induced cracks. Wind wear. Rusted decay. Water stains. Even the messengers of guano, mud splatters and soot streaks have their play on the textured surfaces onto which Swoon applies and then studiously removes her media.