0:05:05
Delicious
Digg
StumbleUpon
Propeller
Reddit
Magnoliacom
Newsvine
Furl
Facebook
Google
Yahoo
Technorati
IcerocketThis In the Factory series features artist Julianne Swartz. Julianne discusses her career as an artist, favorite movie of the year, her installation "Terrain" at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and acupuncture. As always, it's an engaging conversation, directly from an artist, filled with many more details.
My name is Julianne Swartz and the title of my piece is "Terrain".
I was asked to do a piece for the pavilion area, the entry pavilion. I spent a little bit of time in that space, just a couple hours
and thought about the verticality of the space and thought about cutting that verticality with a kind of mesh that you could see through
and thought about filling the space with sound, with voices...
[Whispering from artwork]
and I also thought about sound moving around the room because the room has quite a bit of echo to it and you can, sort of, overhear other peoples' conversations
wherever you are in the room. So, I thought about, kind of, capitalizing on that aspect and almost making, like, ghosts in the room.
[Whispering from artwork]
I asked the volunteers to record for this. I gave them, sort of, leading questions asking to obtain material, but a lot of the material is their own.
I asked them to hum in a certain way with the breath and then I asked them to let that tone lead them into a song from their memory.
[Whispering from artwork]
I asked them to imagine someone that they felt tenderness for and whisper as though they were speaking into that person's ear, or like, what would they say to that person?
So it's a little bit of a visualization exercise.
Well, I generally start out with an overriding concept like an overriding atmosphere or idea of how I want a space to feel
and then I'll just set about trying to make that happen and there's lots of experimenting and lots of testing...
The way this piece is made, it's twelve separate channels of sound, so it's twelve color-coded nets to distinguish each channel
and each net is made in two pieces and we had to do a lot of figuring out how to make these nets, you know, to look the way I wanted and also function the way I wanted.
The materials are primarily wire, fourteen gauge, just regular hookup wire. I researched... probably called all the wire distributors in the country
and two out of the country, in order to get the colors I needed, because I needed twelve colors of wire. You know, of course, I wanted them to be certain shades
and so I ended up having to get a couple of them dyed, but most of them I found commercially available, and then the other main material are speakers
and there is some hardware, like some connectors and the sound file and that's it.
It fits in the realm of other pieces I've done that use sound in a spatial way and it also fits into work that I have been doing recently
which is exploring sentiment and bringing sentiment into a fine art context, which is a little tricky.
I'm interested in artists who are working outside of the gallery context. In some ways where art and social practice meet.
I am interested in that. Like Paul Chan just did a project in New Orleans that involved bringing a theater group in Harlem to do
a rendition of "Waiting for Godot" on the street at different sites in New Orleans and I thought that was a really, really interesting project.
I saw a German movie I really liked called, "The Lives of Others," that was good.
A naturopath. I'd work with medicine, you know, some kind of natural medicine, maybe I might be an acupuncturist or something.
I am interested in chemistry and alchemy and healing.
Okay...good...
http://www.imamuseum.org/blog
Post new comment