This dual-space exhibition featuring the works of Arizona resident artist Beth Ames Swartz.

Swartz has had over 70 one-person art exhibitions including a solo show at The Jewish Museum in New York as well as three major traveling museum exhibitions. She received the Governor's Individual Artist Award in 2001 in Arizona, and a retrospective of her work was mounted in 2002 at The Phoenix Art Museum, with a monograph about her work co-published by The Phoenix Art Museum and Hudson Hills Press. Swartz was honored in New York in 2003 by the Veteran Feminists of America for her outstanding contribution to the Arts nationally.

The concept of order, disorder, and reordering is central to Swartz's work. Scientists talk of order and randomness, of entropy, and of eternity's eventual end when all differences disappear. Yet, she is an optimist. Swartz sees life as an anti-entropic force for order. In her work, she constantly propose not a duality of life and death, but an endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

The artist explores systems of knowledge by translating philosophical concepts into aesthetic visual experiences. Her paintings honor differences among cultures by utilizing symbols and words that represent concepts shared by people of widely different philosophic worldviews. She hopes that, by exposing people to the beliefs of others and by showing the interconnectedness of one belief system to another, each of us may experience a common compassion.

Swartz has studied many systems of knowledge and beliefs during the last forty years, well known ones and those of more esoteric nature; incorporating those teachings into her life and art in an evolving process. She tends to work in series, beginning a new body of work with an entirely different visual approach soon after solving the aesthetic challenges of her last series. The artist likes to investigate the healing potential of the images, often employing pilgrimage and other ritualistic acts in the creation process. Swartz uses word and/or myth-like visual elements from many philosophic and religious systems (including Native American healing practices, Buddhism, Christianity, Taoism, I-Ching, Cabala's Jewish mysticism and the chakra system of Hinduism) in order to facilitate communication with her viewers on both a conscious and unconscious level.