Julianne Swartz: Terrain

In Julianne Swartz’s sound installation, breathing, humming, and whispered messages of love in English, Spanish, Korean, Hebrew, Polish, Croatian, Japanese, Greek, French, and Chinese meld together, to generate sounds like blowing wind, rushing water or rustling leaves. Swartz constructed the soundtracks by recording the voices of 38 volunteers, and composing their utterances together. Terrain was originally commissioned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2008. In its first installation at the Museum’s entry pavilion in 2008, 12 channels of sound moved through 208 speakers in orchestrated movements to form a kind of sound landscape (thus the title of the work). Swartz has reconfigured Terrain for the DCCA’s DuPont I Gallery.

In writing about Swartz’s work for a 2005 Colby College exhibition, Sharon Corwin states “light and sound function for Swartz as materials to be refracted, distorted, and manipulated. By exploring thresholds of perception, her work often functions in a liminal field - in between the perceptible and the immaterial. In so doing, Swartz transforms the ordinary into the magical, the unremarkable into the fascinating.” 1 Terrain’s relatively simple technology creates a flow of sound that suggests the fragility of life and the ephemeral nature of communication. In many of her installations, Swartz translates “events” from one location to another, surprising the viewer who comes across these works in the midst of a gallery or museum space. Their transitory qualities are contained within a very solid architectural space; the walls provide an immovable structure for a memorable, but otherwise fleeting, experience.