ART-PREVIEW:Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze’s work attempts to navigate and model the ceaseless proliferation of information and objects in contemporary life. Incorporating elements of painting, architecture, and installation within her sculpture, Sze investigates the value we place on objects and explores how objects ascribe meaning to the places and times we inhabit.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

Sarah Sze employs a constellation of everyday materials in her work, ranging from found objects and photographs to handmade sculptures and living plants, creating encyclopedic and accumulative landscapes that penetrate walls and stretch across museums. Her work often takes on architectures, transforming space through radical shifts of scale or colonizing overlooked and peripheral spaces. Sze sees sculpture as evidence of behavior and she leaves her own raw process of experimentation apparent in her work.  As a result, her pieces often seem to hover in a transitional state, as if caught between growing and dying.  Captured in this suspension, the works become self-perpetuating systems, seemingly capable of aspiration, decay, and renewal. New works by Sarah Sze are on presentation at Gagosian Gallery in Rome. A video installation, of the latest of Sze’s “Timekeeper” series (2015- ) transforms the gallery into an immersive environment that is part sculpture, part cinema. “Timekeeper” explores the origin of the moving image, and mirrors the endless flow of information that overwhelms us every day. Screens flicker and fade, and projected images race cyclically around the room. A whirring, clicking world of objects is arranged in accordance with a specific logic: that of a working desk, a site of the studio. Formed in part from the remnants of the actual editing desk where the work was made, Timekeeper is simultaneously a sculptural installation and a functional tool: a projector itself. One of the recurring traits of Sze’s work is her interest in time. However, Sze does not work with the usual chronological and mechanical concept of time as something that can be measured and recorded; rather, she explores time as something that arises out of the unpredictable ways in which the images and experiences of everyday life affect our sense of time passing. Science seeks to define time by measuring it down to the smallest nanosecond, and we live our lives in accordance with this approach. “Timekeeper” challenges such an objective view, creating instead a perception of time in which experiences and frames of reference are brought into play upon encountering the work. Taking the form of a three-dimensional collage, the series holds and hides moments and memories that can be re-experienced across time and place by each individual who visits. In November, Sze will add her first outdoor stone sculpture to the exhibition, a natural boulder split open like a geode. Each of the two revealed cuts has a sunset sky embedded in its flat surface, alluding to both the images perceptible in gongshi (scholar’s rocks) and the heavenly subjects of Renaissance paintings.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, Via Francesco Crispi 16, Rome, Duration: 13/10/18-12/1/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:30-19:00, https://gagosian.com