Julianne Swartz: How Deep Is Your

Acclaimed for her unique blend of high- and low-tech materials, Julianne Swartz makes the presence of the viewer fundamental to her work. Her architecturally sensitive installations employ 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 allows 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 McCormack Forefront Galleries as well as other select areas scattered throughout the IMA.

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 describes her work as “confronting institutional and patriarchal ideas of what is valued as efficient, evident, and independent” and seeking 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.