Atlanta-based Deanna Sirlin is known for her abstract paintings and large-scale installations that fill space with color and light, from her 1999 installation on the High Museum of Art’s windows to a giant transparency on the windows of Venice’s Palazzo Bembo during the 2022 Biennale.
Sirlin’s latest work fits in a much smaller frame. “Intimate Distance” is a 2-minute, 34-second looped video, built around what Sirlin calls “a dance of two hands moving within a multi-hued grid of moving colors.” She created it with three collaborators: performer and video editor Kaia Lee; composer and multi-instrumentalist Bill Rea and poet E Hughes, who wrote and reads the poem, “For Deanna Sirlin’s Intimate Distance,” which plays over Rea’s track.
“Intimate Distance” plays Thursday through Saturday, Oct. 15-17, in the Black Box Theatre at the Alpharetta Arts Center, with funding from the Fulton County Board of Commissioners. “For me, Intimate Distance is about the spaces between people — how we reach toward one another, how we experience absence, and how closeness and distance can exist at the same time,” Sirlin said. “Our bodies are both bridges that enable us to connect with others and boundaries that separate us.”
Asked what in her own life pushed her toward the subject, she answered in three words: “The pandemic lockdown.”
Here are five things to know before you go.
1. Strangers helped inspired it.
“The idea of the hands, Sirlin said, “was actually given to me by the public. I want the person, the viewer, to be in the work.”
For years, visitors to Sirlin’s transparent installations in Portugal, Venice and Atlanta have posted photos of themselves inside the work. In Portugal, people took off their shoes to show off their patterned socks in the colored light. One little boy, about 3, got a chair so he could climb into the piece. Others were photographed holding the light in their hands, and she loved it.
2. Her collaborator was once her apprentice.
Kaia Lee was an art apprentice in Sirlin’s studio in 2019, while Lee was in high school and Sirlin was an artist in residence for the City of Alpharetta. Lee went on to earn a computer science degree from the University of Georgia. In 2025, she helped Sirlin produce “Watermark,” a temporary video installation made while Sirlin was the Georgia Tech Library artist in residence. Their work together on “Watermark” led to “Intimate Distance,” where Lee is both performer and editor.
3. Kinko’s was once her studio.
Sirlin, a painter first, didn’t own a computer until 2001. So when she prepared “Retracings,” her 1999 installation on the High Museum’s windows, she did it at Kinko’s, with a Xerox machine, an X-Acto knife and a glue stick. That project changed her painting. Once she saw Peachtree Street through her work on the glass, she said she no longer needed to paint landscapes. The real thing had become part of the work. Today, Lee handles the editing software. Sirlin still means to learn it.
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4. Rea and Hughes immediately got the vision.
The visuals came first, then the music, then the poem. Sirlin met Rea through composer Debora Kaye, and the two had never worked together. He sent her two pieces for feedback. She chose the second and told him he didn’t need to make any more. Hughes, whom Sirlin met when they were commissioned to write a poem about one of her paintings for an Elevate Atlanta exhibition at Chastain Gallery, wrote and read a new poem for the video. Its run of colors, from azure and fuchsia to periwinkle and sapphire, is deliberate. “I wanted these elements to have their own presence rather than illustrating what was happening on screen,” Sirlin wrote.
5. The piece was mobile first.
Sirlin first imagined “Intimate Distance” playing on cellphones. The plan hit a practical snag. “You can’t just put a cell phone on a wall. People take them,” she said. So, instead, she’s thinking through how to deliver the piece directly to people’s phones, as requested. For now, the Black Box Theatre act as its home.
“Intimate Distance” is on view Oct. 15 through Oct. 17, in the Alpharetta Black Box Theatre at the Alpharetta Arts Center.
