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Julianne Swartz will be the subject of a mid-career survey organized by deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA). Curated by Rachael Arauz with the full participation of the artist, Julianne Swartz: How Deep Is Your will gather together for the first time a significant group of Swartz’s installations and sculpture that invite viewer participation with elegance, humor, and intelligence.

Acclaimed for her unique blend of high and low-tech materials, Swartz utilizes both existing and self-made technologies, and has often made the ephemeral presence of the viewer fundamental to her work. Her art quietly celebrates contradictions and dichotomies that invite attentive visitors to slow down and sharpen their senses. 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, vinyl wall drawings that guide viewers to secret architectural spaces, and PVC tubing and speakers that allow buildings to communicate with their inhabitants. Some of her sculptures subversively embrace the appearance of “new media” or “video” only to reveal a hand-made simplicity that prompts viewers to question our culture’s relationship to technology.

Swartz has exhibited widely, including site-specific commissions for the New Museum, Tate Liverpool, and theTang Museum, and group shows at P.S. 1/MoMA, the Aldrich Museum, 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 Josée Bienvenu Gallery in New York and the Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ.

This exhibition has been made possible in part by a major grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and by generous matching support from Anthony and Beth Terrana. Additional support provided by Francis H. Williams and Chandra Jessee.

Julianne Swartz: How Deep Is Your will be accompanied by the largest publication about the artist to date, featuring essays by Rachael Arauz and SMoCA curator Cassandra Coblentz and texts by Janine Antoni, Sharon Corwin, Tim Davis, Bec Garland, Byron Kim, Stephen Litchy, Jenny Monick, Judy Pfaff, Barb Smith, David Levi Strauss, Jonathan Van Dyke and Emily Weiner.