Sarah Sze is an American artist who lives in New York. Born in in Boston 1969, she studied painting and architecture. She is best known for her sculptures, made of hundreds of everyday objects, which she conceives specifically for the gallery spaces that host them. More recently, the artist has incorporated moving images into her work including them in large structures that appear delicate and fragile.
For Sarah Sze, our daily lives are filled with images – both moving and fixed - printed in magazines, gleaned from the web, or taken with our smartphones. The works presented here show how much these images can alter our memories and make us lose track of time.
The sphere in the big room is titled Twice Twilight and can even be explored from the inside. Feel free to go in during your visit!
In the smaller room, the pendulum that swings back and forth is named Tracing Fallen Sky.
Sarah Sze attaches great importance to the spaces in which she installs her structures. Here, she plays with Jean Nouvel’s glass building, blurring the boundaries between inside and outside. The way we view her installations changes depending on the time of the day, the weather, and the light conditions visible outside.
When you enter the room, you’ll notice projections on the building’s glass walls. The circular movement of these images might make you think of a magic lantern. In the middle of the space, the planetarium-like structure is an assemblage of objects, lights, sound, video, and still and moving images. As you move around inside it, you will see your reflection and shadow projected onto the large glass windows. You become part of the sculpture!
This proliferation of images reminds us of our daily lives, where televisions and telephones constantly bombard us with information.
For the artist, this work is about memory, how little by little, over time, memories change or disappear.
A multitude of videos are projected onto this steel sculpture and elements arranged around it on the ground. These videos show metal melting, salt crystallizing, and paint being mixed. To these images are added others that represent the sky at different times of day. The central element is a pendulum that moves in an irregular and hypnotic way.
In the making of these sculptures, the artist was inspired by centuries-old scientific tools (the planetarium and Foucault’s pendulum) devised to measure time and space. However, the artist confuses us by including a myriad objects and images in her work, perhaps suggesting how impossible this task is.
Glossary
- Gleaned: to collect or gather little by little
- Installation: a large-scale three-dimensional work of arts made using a variety of materials and often designed for a specific space
- Planetarium: a domed theatre in which images of stars, planets and constellations are projected in order to show how they appear to move in the sky
- Magic lantern: an early type of projection device that projected enlarged images painted on glass plates onto a screen
- Pendulum: a heavy object attached to a rope that swings left to right, back and forth Foucault’s pendulum is an instrument that demonstrates the rotation of the earth
- Hypnotic: causing a state close to sleep
