Debra Swack

Biography

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I am a digital artist who makes videos, large archival photographs and digital projects using drawing, sculpture and sound installation.- Image 1 - My DVD animation video ‘Little Wars; the Carousel Project’ (see Printmaking Today) completed under a co-sponsorship at the Banff Center for the Arts in Canada was recently shown at the Beecher Center for Arts and Technology at the Butler Institute in Ohio. Carousel means ‘little wars’ in Italian. War games such as jousting tournaments developed into carousels, rides and perhaps in the future; virtual reality. In addition to horses, menagerie animals represented desirable characteristics needed in battle. All photos were taken of rides on New York’s Upper West Side and will be printed
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archivally (each 24 x 30 in). - Image 2 - ‘Digital Mazes’ (drawings, projections and sculptural forms generated by random software algorithms). - Image 3 - ‘Army Men’ (DVD video) is a humorous reflection on the concept that in times of war, one is taught to hate one’s enemy.
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- Images 4 & 5 - ‘The Trees’ is a year long photographic project that shows the changing seasons and passages of time through foliage and light and explores Li; dynamic forms in nature; tree branching, connectedness (transference of water, oxygen, nutrients, electrical impulses and energy including love). The project will culminate in a portfolio/gallery installation of a maximum of seventy-two archival 24 x 36 in photos and an animation video called ‘Connect’ on the biology of love using the tree forms and branches as a metaphor for the body. - Images 6 & 7 - ‘Ghosts’ ( photos / animation video with music by Dr. Swack; a study of residential ornamentation and architecture, what former inhabitants leave behind). Dr. Swack was commissioned by Clarence John Laughlin’s widow to write “Waters of Memory” (Centaur Records) in response to Victorian plantation architecture photographed in his book ‘Ghosts Along the Mississippi‘.
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- Images 8 & 9 - ‘My Perfect Child’ (photo/text installation on dinnerware, also prints, explores the history of engineering the perfect child through genetics, cloning, selective abortion, and its origins in literature, psychology, anthropology, and child-rearing manuals) - Image 10 & 11 - ‘24 Rules for Marriage’ (24 cliches about marriage explored through wedding photography with quotes from “The Rules for Marriage” by Fein and Schneider),
Debra Swack
478 Central Park West, Apt. 7B
New York
10025
New York, NY
NY
New York
North America

t: 212 8666-2192
m: 212
f: 212
w: http://users.rcn.com/speak/dswack/default.htm




Web Links
Art Frenzy
Art & Science Collaborations
Harlem Open Artist Studio
Artist Website
NY Arts Magazine-95 Chimes Review
MIT Press
Beecher Center for Arts and Technology
Banff Center for the Arts
Queens Museum
Rich Leslie Review