LINCOLN, MA.- DeCordova presents Julianne Swartz: How Deep Is Your, the artist’s first career survey, on view September 2–December 30, 2012. Acclaimed for her unique blend of high and low-tech materials, Julianne Swartz makes the presence of the viewer fundamental to her work in images, objects, and architecturally sensitive installations. She employs lenses that transform mundane objects and hidden locations into magical moving pictures, mirrors that disorient a viewer’s spatial perception and self-awareness, and PVC tubing that allow buildings to communicate with their inhabitants. How Deep Is Your features Swartz’s work in photography, sculpture, installation, and sound, and gathers together for the first time a significant group of her large-scale installations—reconceived for the unique interior, exterior, and liminal spaces of deCordova. The exhibition is curated by independent curator Rachael Arauz and co-organized by deCordova and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona, where it will be on view October 12, 2013–February 2, 2014.
Dennis Kois, Director, says “We are so pleased to be able to partner with the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art to present Julianne Swartz: How Deep Is Your—a show that blurs material and process, viewer and participant, and object and architecture in ways that raise all sorts of questions about technology, about perception, about how we connect with each other, and about what objects and experiences might mean.”
Julianne Swartz: How Deep Is Your introduces Swartz’s work to a new audience, and demonstrates her unique contributions to interactive and participatory art, sound art, and installation art. The way in which ideas take material form in Swartz’s work eludes easy definitions and labels. Swartz writes of her work as “confronting institutional and patriarchal ideas of what is valued as efficient, evident, and independent” and seeking alternatively to foreground undervalued qualities such as “the perceptual, the experiential, the introspective, the emotional, and interdependence within a community.” A refreshing current of sincerity and hopefulness informs all of Swartz’s practice, and her deceptively simple arrangements of materials often result in profound observations about society, power, or human nature. Offering visitors the thrill of a conceptual scavenger hunt for the senses, as well as a thorough introduction to this groundbreaking contemporary artist, How Deep Is Your engages audiences of all ages.
“Swartz is an incredibly talented and intelligent artist. Her work imbues minimalist forms with deep emotional content,” remarked curator Rachael Arauz. “The opportunity to gather her work in all media as well as reconstruct some of her major large-scale installations offers new insights into her complex engagement with themes of interactivity, materiality, and human experience.”
Swartz has exhibited widely, including site-specific commissions for the New Museum, Tate Liverpool, and the Tang Museum, and group shows at P.S. 1/MoMA, the Aldrich Museum, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and Ballroom Marfa. She was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and has had recent solo exhibitions at the Jewish Museum, the Colby College Museum and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
She is represented by Mixed Greens and Jose Bienvenu Gallery in New York and the Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ.
