Sebastian Smee
Most of Swartz's work is marked by a modesty that's in line with its feeling for human connection. It’s work that, ultimately, is about love, and about what Wallace Stevens called "the difference that we make in what we see." It can seem incomplete when first encountered - lacking a necessary component that’s hard to put your finger on - until you realize it is you. "What I lack is this me that you see," wrote Paul Valery, and the insight holds here: How you see Swartz's work draws attention not just to how you see, but how you are seen. Her aesthetic achievements are just as contingent, just as prone to fluctuation and reversal, just as fragile...
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Rachel Arauz
Swartz also invites gallery visitors to handle, listen and look - often in unconventional museum spaces. More subtly, her work employs them as spectators of interactivity, a less considered version of participation, yet one often crucial to the complete experience of some of her sculptures. These modes of interactivity combine with Swartz’s skillful transformation of simple, industrial materials to engage viewers with their own emotional history as well as the formal traditions of participatory art...
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Cassandra Coblentz
Julianne Swartz wants to let you in. She wants her audience to feel something, something she too has felt, she wants to connect. In her work, she offers up her own human vulnerability to reach her audience in a way that is at once comforting and unnerving: she taps into the private space of intimacy. She does so with a gentle confidence that is seductive and provocative, luring her audience in with a sensuality that comes dangerously close to the realm of the sentimental yet retains a distance that maintains objectivity and enables her to toy with her viewers' comfort levels, ultimately provoking them to question their own relationship to the notion of intimacy...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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