Sarah Sze

Through complex constellations of objects and a proliferation of images, Sarah Sze expands upon the never-ending stream of visual narratives that we negotiate daily, from magazines and newspapers, television and iPhones, to cyberspace and outer space. Her practice evokes the generative and recursive process of image-making in a world where consumption and production are more interdependent, where the beginning of one idea is the ending of another—and where sculpture gives rise to images, and images to sculpture.

 

The artist embeds her nuanced sculptural language into the material surfaces of painting and into the digital realm—collapsing distinctions between two, three and four dimensions. Her practice fundamentally alters our sense of time, place, and memory by transforming our experiences of the physical world around us. 

 

Through painting, sculpture, video and installations, 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. Like the scientific instruments of measurement they often reference, Sze's work attempts to quantify and organize the universe, ascribing a fragile, personal system of order. The works become both a device for organizing and dismantling information and a mechanism to locate and dislocate oneself in time and space.