Pawel Kruk: Winning the Water
Curator. Alcatraz to Aquatic Park, San Francisco. October 2011
Continuing his artistic inquiry into the heroic nature of athletes and athletic feats, Pawel Kruk trained for six months with the renowned Dolphin Club before executing the 1.5 mile swim in the icy waters of the San Francisco Bay. As a small crowd cheered from the shore, Kruk swam from Alcatraz to Aquatic Park accompanied by a rousing, commissioned score played live by the band Coconut. A videographer and photographer were on a small vessel with the band, and another boat contained spectators encouraging Kruk along the way. San Francisco’s South End Rowing Club enthusiastically joined the project, supplying the boats and volunteer rowers. As the swimmer came to shore, exhausted and triumphant, a crowd embraced Kruk and celebrated the results of almost a year of preparation and a perfect execution of both an athletic accomplishment and also a complicated performance pulled off with the support of many community partners.
Kruk describes the project: “I perceive my artistic practice as an intersection between the different kinds of art media and theoretical reflection but also as an intermediary between present and past. Since my arrival to San Francisco, I've been able to reconnect with some memories collected during my adolescent years of training to become a world class swimmer. Through the discovery of the book The Swimmer as Hero, my father-in-law's passion for bay-swimming and the miraculous effects of water, I was able to enter into those long forgotten mythic regions of dream and the unconscious.”
Winning the Water was presented as part of the SFAC Galleries' 40th Anniversary season, and was a key component of the exhibition Transplanted. For Transplanted, the exhibiting artists, Pawel Kruk, Richard T. Walker and Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe, were asked to create new work reflecting on how living in the Bay Area has influenced their artistic practice. Kruk, a performance artist, Suarez-Wolfe, a sculptor, and Walker, a video artist, each arrived with extensive international exhibition experience, and in the past three years have caught the attention of local critics, philanthropic organizations and major institutions. The exhibition asked: How long do you have to live in the Bay Area to be considered a local artist? How quickly do new arrivals influence our cultural landscape and help establish defining regional aesthetics? How quickly does the Bay Area influence the artistic production of newcomers?”
Project Acknowledgements: David Cunningham, Buck Delventhal, Juliette Delventhal, Luther Green, Colter Jacobsen, Milena Korolczuk, Justin Limoges, Owen B. Mehegan, Paul Nordquist, Kimberly Peinado, Airyka Rockefeller, Richard T. Walker, Tomo Yasuda, Electric Works Gallery, and Members of the South End Rowing Club.
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