Crew
Paul Da Plumber
Fun is the universal language. Paul Cesewski is a master builder fabricator welder and fungineer–cannibalizing and carnivalizing to build large scale interactive kinetic sculpture and pedal powered rides out of re-used material for art shows and carnivals. Paul has served on the original Miss Rockaway Armada and all of the Swimming Cities projects. Paul invented and built the giant floating 20′ tall 3 seater Bicycle Ferris Wheel that is part of this project, as well as a beautiful traditional Dory aka Red Boat used for tows on this project, also two canoe cargo bikes which are all unique objects of art. Many of Paul’s rides travel with San Francisco’s Cyclecide Bike Rodeo.
He has also built a homemade train that travels on abandoned railroads and documents his adventures.
paulsrides.com
cyclecide.com
Ian Page
Ian Page is a Pittsburgh based video maker, sculptor, and performer. His work sifts through failures and aberrations of our fiddling form; the deviations in the scope of knowledge and curiosity. From over head his work addresses our co-existence with technology. At face value, the play is the fear, conditioning, and humor in the relationship of our bodies, perceptions, and the world around us, the areas between on and off, timid and brave, the sliding scale of willing participation, understanding, and permeation of physical matter by signal. His work brings up the malleability of the mind juxtaposed with the rigidity of technology, the interface and the syndrome, the resignation, conditioning, skepticism, and paradox in our usage. It is a cocked-eyed perspective looking closely at the momentous and lively rubbing of a piece of plastic, attempting to shine a flashlight on the trajectory of technology.
ianpage.net
Robyn Hasty
Robyn Hasty is a Brooklyn based artist working in a variety of media including printmaking, sculpture and wet-plate collodion photography. My work deals with the fluidity of boundaries: the blending of history with present, of individuals with their environment, of artist with subject and audience, of aesthetic practice with life.
robynhasty.org
Gabe Meyer
Gabe Meyer aka Long Gone Gabe aka Boots aka Tugboat aka Buckshot aka Longo Negabe is a builder, sculptor, musician, muralist, and wilderness caterer from Hannibal, MO. Dreaming of building tree houses, releasing vinyl/touring as the Flood Bros., eating all the worlds great sandwiches, and continuing to explore/build on earth/beyond with friends is what will lead the direction of my life. A main function that creating things holds for me is it’s elusiveness. Art that does not force people to chose sides or present clear questions, realizations, answers. Unclear, unanswerable questions. That’s what I like.
Anna Ialeggio
Anna Ialeggio is 28, lives in a boat disguised as a van, prefers to travel the minor arterial passages, and collects alphabets. born by the sea and raised in the mountains. utopian builder & painter of inhabitable autonomous worlds.
Tod Seelie
Tod Seelie has photographed in over twenty countries on five different continents. Originally from Cleveland, he relocated to Brooklyn in 1997. Tod was a founding member of The Miss Rockaway Armada, and continued on to travel with both manifestations of the Swimming Cities. He is also a regular featured contributor to the arts and culture website Fecal Face. His work has appeared in publications such as The NY Times, New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, Spin, Men’s Journal, Juxtapoz, Thrasher, Vice, American Way, Art Forum, Art In America, Flash Art and Adbusters among others. Tod has exhibited work in solo and group shows in New York, Berlin, Tokyo, Paris, Milan, Sydney, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami and at Mass MoCA. His work has also appeared in photography books, such as The Vice Photo Book, Hijacked and Backyard Shakedown.
todseelie.com
suckapants.com
Phil Andrews
Phil Andrews is a Brooklyn-based musician, songwriter and arranger who founded and led bands such as the Atlanta Sedition Orchestra and Apocalypse Five & Dime and has written arrangements and original music for the Rude Mechanical Orchestra. He’s a founding member of the Miss Rockaway Armada and has participated in all of its projects to date. He’s also a photographer whose work was recently published in the book Truckers.
Ellery Neon
Ellery Neon is moving around like a rocket again, and loving it. He makes art & boats out of trash, and vice versa. Puppets are great, painting outside is fabulous.
Nichon Glerum
Nichon Glerum is a photographer / designer / editor / organizer and baker extraordinaire with a Dutch passport. She has lived and worked in 4 countries on 3 continents, photographing Italian opera’s in Verona’s ancient amphitheater, organizing design exhibitions in Melbourne, writing for renowned fashion magazines in Amsterdam and building art installations in an old Iron Curtain army base near Berlin. Currently she is living in an all beige Philly rowhouse with the majority of the other Rockaway people on this bio page.
Tracy Jarvis
Tracy Jarvis is originally from the Rust Belt. She makes videos and sounds that explore power in its various manifestations. Her other interests include using her body and costumes to syncretize ideas; co-existing with dybbuks and red winged monsters; and appreciating colors, textures and immersive environments. She also encourages gentle and wild creatures and wants to contribute to the collective why.
Ledia Carroll
Ledia Carroll is an original member of the Miss Rockaway Armada. She has done street and park closure permits for other peoples art events, negotiated funding on behalf of artists (including members of the Armada) for festivals, and most recently did the permitting for a fundraiser art walk in the downtown SF. Ledia’s personal art work is usually landscape installation as well responding to vanished geologic history and the measure of level. Her projects include building a walkway in a public fountain, dumping snow at a parking meter, and drawing a line around an imagined Mission Lake in San Francisco. Ledia has also practiced landscape design for the past 14 years.
lediacarroll.com
Wolf
Wolf was born into the crew, learned to walk on boats on the Hudson, learned to swim in the Schuylkill. Paul and Ledia’s son, he is covered in sunscreen and sweat, hanging out at the boat junkyard in an old canoe, fixing his bike.
Constance Hockaday
Constance Hockaday belongs to a family of boat builders called the Floating Nuetrinos. Headed by modern nomad Poppa Neutrino, they have built more than twelve rafts, largely from salvaged and recycled materials – some of which have crossed the Atlantic Ocean. She builds boats, books, and public lectures. Her most recent project is the Boggsville Boatel and Boat-in Theatre— a hotel and movie theatre made from salvaged boats and wood.
constancehockaday.wordpress.com
Rebecca Heinegg
Rebecca Heinegg is a criminal defense attorney from Brooklyn, as well as a few other things that also have nothing to do with building boats.
Marshall LaCount
Marshall LaCount, October birthday, Libra. Is a maker and supporter of many things, and is currently claiming Miss Rockaway Armada, Dark Dark Dark, Swimming Cities, Flood Tide Film, Modern Times Spychestra.
Paulie Anne Duke
Paulie Anne Duke was born into the swamp and sea on the islands of North Carolina. Engendered into a family of collectors her childhood was spent learning the bounty of oddments. When she wasn’t being lookout for her dumpstering father. She scavenged the swamp and sea floor for forgotten treasures and seashells to create her first puppet shows played for the woods and creatures of the bayou. Now she is perpetually destined to make puppet shows inspired by the disregarded, and political. As well as sing her tender songs into the wavering wind of which she follows.
Moses Grub
I am Moses Grubb!
I am a Clown!
I can build stuff.
mosesgrubb.com
Eliza Strack
Eliza Strack is obsessed with bicycles. She is a co-founder of the Bikedance teams The Sprockettes and Bay Area Derailleurs. She was tricked into playing music with Show Me the Pink. She’s not sure if that makes her a musician. Yet she aspires to be a top 40 r&b artist in the year 2012. If Ke$sha can do it, the field is open. Junk boats have been in her dreams for years and is looking forward to pirating out.
Alyson Perry
Alyson Perry is a visual artist, clown and puppeteer. She formed a performance group: The Ragdoll Engine. We make shows. (Physical/wordless clown acts, junk puppet street shows and odd-ball radio hours.) Also, painter of murals, public school educator, wrangler of stories, maybe builder in hearts. She is so honored to be aboard with the Rockaway in Philly!
Emily Kempf
Hometown: ATL!
Age: 26
Occupation: In the real world-personal assistant. In the fun world-band den mother/singer songwriter/visual artist/dancer/animator/obsessive creator.
Interests: making stuff! All the time. All the time. All the time.
Rick Weaver
Weaver prefers to deliver duplications of activity across a handful of “disciplines” into the margins of the new century.
Human Conduct
Curator
Melissa Caldwell, Director of Exhibitions, Philadelphia Art Alliance
Melissa Caldwell is the director of exhibitions at the Philadelphia Art Alliance where she is responsible for implementing and directing a rotating visual arts exhibitions schedule in the six main exhibition galleries in the historic Wetherill Mansion. While at the Art Alliance, Caldwell has curated many group and solo exhibitions. Highlights include: Unbecoming: The Private as Public Spectacle; Hopping Fences: Influences in Modern Living (2004); Leaning Keep: Brian David Dennis (2004). “In Ever Greater Measure”: 90 Years at the Philadelphia Art Alliance (2005); A Delicate Constitution: Reconsidering the Decorative Aesthetic (2006); Out of Frame: Motion Art from Mobius (2006); Gravity: Jon Clark and Angus Powers with Realms: Bean Finneran (2007), SunKoo Yuh: Along the Way (2007), Paper[space] (2008), State of the Union: Contemporary Craft in Dialogue (2009), Vanitas: Contemporary Reflections Candy De Pew, Myra Mimlitsch Gray, Katherine Kaminsky, Audrey Hasen Russell and Gae Savannah (2010); and The Sitting Room: Four Studies (2010). In addition, Caldwell has also organized over 40 exhibitions for the Art Alliance Solos program, a series of one-person exhibitions featuring artists from the Philadelphia region who may not have had an opportunity to exhibit their work in a major institution.
Prior to moving to Philadelphia, Caldwell worked at the Corcoran Gallery of Art as an assistant in the museums Archives Department. She has also served as an advisor for several commercial and non-profit galleries. Melissa Caldwell received an M.A. in Art History at American University, Washington D.C. in 1997.