By The TimesLedger
“Seven Swans” is on view at Queens Theatre in the Park in Flushing Meadows Corona Park through May 13.
The exhibit, on view at the Main and Studio Galleries of theater building, is based on the fairy tale, and was created by artists Erika deVries and Marc Lepson.
In the tale, a sister tries to break the spell cast on her seven brothers that has turned them into swans.
Lepson and deVries transform the Theater's interior which dates from the 1964 World's Fair, with drawings, cutouts, photographs and video installations.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturdays, from 12 to 6 p.m., and one hour before performances
In the classic story, a young woman who is forced to live, along with her seven brothers, with a jealous stepmother. The stepmother puts a curse on the brothers, turning them into swans. In order to release the brothers from the curse, the young woman must spend the winter knitting jackets from nettles for each of the men before they return in the spring -all while remaining completely silent.
The woman is accused of being a witch and sentenced to be burned alive. Meanwhile she continues to knit furiously and refuses to speak in her own defense. Just as she is about to be thrown on the pyre, the seven brothers return, swooping down on the angry crowd that has gathered. The young woman tosses the jackets on each brother and, one by one, they are returned to their original form. The last bother, whose jacket was not completely finished, must spend the rest of his days with one arm still the wing of a swan.
Working loosely with the plot, deVries, an adjunct professor of photography at the Tisch School of the Arts, and Lepson, a Pollock-Krasner Fellow, and program director for the Lower East Side Printshop in Manhattan, will create an installation that draws on the drama of the story.
Large paper cutouts of flying swans will be installed on the glass brick windows of the Main Gallery. Paper coats will be hung on the walls along with the shapes of swans resulting from the cutouts. In the Studio Gallery, photographs of seven people standing in for the seven brothers will be installed along with a video piece created while the artists were visiting faculty members at Middlebury College in Vermont this winter.
For more information and travel directions, call the box office at 760-0064.
