Charles LaBelle

In other words, her work knows no bounds. In fact, it is devoted to boundlessness and to fluidity. Every attempt at containment is countered by an insistent rupturing, a preference for the playful destructiveness of leaks. Quietly worming their way into places they shouldn't go, Swartz' PVC piping, fibre-optic cables, wires, threads, lenses and tape collectively invade the body of buildings, spreading like indiscriminate infections... [ more ]

Tim Griffin

Light, like information, becomes a material to direct, manipulate and guide. And, in fact, the quality of light is transformed during its passage, as the fiber optic wires' mirrored interiors produce a strangely intense and diffuse optical texture, a nether worlds visuality-all in order to bring the intangible to the edge of materiality....[ more ]

Patrick Callery

To make a macro-to-micro connection, Julianne Swartz's "viewing machines" transform the perspective of a room, the scene outside a window, the mess in a closet into a hazy, uncanny experience.She builds portals that project a reality that is no longer objective, impartial and evidential. A constructed image, like a photograph, but not frozen in time, a fictional and ambiguous event..[ more ]

Sharon Corwin

Julianne Swartz uses commonplace materials and simple technologies to create complex aesthetic situations. Her work challenges our preconceptions and expectations about art and asks us to see the world in new ways. Swartz's sculptures and installations are often purposefully low-tech in a high-tech world. Her materials, in fact, can seem quite mundane-scrap wood, PVC pipes, Plexiglas, Mylar, vinyl, mirrors-and far from the traditionally valorized materials of high art. Yet the seeming simplicity of Swartz's materials and technologies often belie a much deeper project... [ more ]

Casandra Coblentz

Swartz creates delicate images by transmitting events (arrangements of tactile objects, reflective tinsel, and fans) from one location to another; using light, lenses, and fiber-optic cables. Her use of the term "event" shows her reluctance to limit the work to material form alone. Objects in a non-disclosed space are transmitted as visual images to a different space in the gallery. In each of her installations Swartz places the traditional gallery space and a visually concealed space in a dynamic interaction. This structure reflects Swartz's interest in proposing a different kind of relationship to the traditional between viewer and work of art...[ more ]

Ellen Pearlman

Sound and light are endemic to our daily experience, but remain essentially ungraspable. We know from engineering and physics that they break down into pulses and waves, but believe we can only hold pulses and waves if we make them into functional light bulbs or radios. Swartz describes their invisible, ephemeral quality as possessing "sensual presence," and believes we receive them through our senses. She delineates sculptural form by making sound and light more palpable to an individual’s mode of interpretation, which means you can’t see them, but you can see the pathway of transmission...[ more ]