Glowlab is pleased to present Drift, a group exhibition by artists Matthew Lusk, Santiago Mostyn, Javier Piñón and Swoon. The show is timed to coincide with the voyage of the Swimming Cities of Serenissima, a fleet of three intricately handcrafted vessels currently navigating the Adriatic Sea from the Karst region of Slovenia to Venice, Italy just in time to ‘crash’ the Venice Biennale. Glowlab has supported Swoon’s raft projects from their conception and the independent spirit of the rafts is the driving force behind this exhibition.

The title, Drift, refers to both physical drifting – a raft as it moves across the ocean – and the metaphorical drifting of transient communities and populations that live on the fringes of mainstream society. These contemporary nomads are icons representing the challenges and possibilities of forging identities in places both physical and emotional that lie far beyond where most are willing to venture.

Matthew Lusk’s anthropomorphic structures are three-dimensional collages assembled out of found pieces of wood and ready-made materials. His sculptures are solitary creatures, strangers on the street, detached and unsympathetic. Life sized, they interact with the viewer in human space while denying access, shuffling along unhindered by this world.

Both meanings of the word drift are explored in the photographs of Santiago Mostyn, who spent two years collaborating with Swoon as a member of the Miss Rockaway Armada collective. While Mostyn’s work centers around the idea of transience, his subjects, members of the collective, are far from being a group of loners. Instead they are shown as a tightly knit community living on the rafts in a dream-like world of their own making, clearly at ease on the fringes of mainstream culture. In 2008, Mostyn published his first photographic essay with Tiny Vices Books entitled ‘All Most Heaven.’ The book includes photos, notes and drawings created in his two years spent on the water.

Javier Piñón’s collages from his Martyr series star the iconic drifter of the American West: the cowboy. In this series, the frontiersman is suggested through a silhouetted shape, a cutout of a man falling or jumping into a picturesque Western landscape. The icon’s vulnerability as he floats through the air undermines his original status as hero. In some images, the cowboy appears to be jumping rather than falling. The viewer is left to wonder whether what we are witnessing is an act of defiance or a hopeless fall from grace. Born in Miami and based in Brooklyn, Piñón has exhibited nationally and internationally after earning his MAT from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. Additionally, he has held the Bauernmarkt Residency, Lenikus Collection, Vienna (2008) and was the 2007 recipient of an Artist Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Known for her large scale installations and street art, Swoon also makes smaller works that combine her lexicon of images with found elements such as wood and fabric. These works seem to preserve a moment, as if they were lifted from the environment where they originally lived, almost by chance. The smaller works serve as documents infused with the spirit of Swoon’s otherwise ephemeral interventions. Drift will include an unusually concentrated group of these smaller works, screenprints of original, large scale block prints and paper cutouts. The artist’s hand is always visible in the play between the wheatpasted and hand-painted or stained elements against the richness of the natural backgrounds. On view are portraits from Swoon’s community and members of her family, specifically her father Milton. This stunning print, Milton, was created especially for the Swimming Cities of Serenissima and has yet to be displayed elsewhere. Swoon’s mastery of her medium is clear in her offering of richly layered cut paper and prints that engage with positive and negative space in a conceptually driven exploration of urban environments. She is an international artist with major pieces in the Museum of Modern Art, PS1’s groundbreaking exhibition Greater New York, and Brooklyn Museum of Art. Swoon has been traveling for the past several years creating exhibitions and workshops in the United States and Europe.