Slice

Sarah Sze has built a distinctive career with installations exploring the intersection of different mediums including painting, sculpture, sound, photography, drawing, video, and architecture. As a post-media artist, her work challenges the threshold between the digital and the analogue, the tactile and the imagined, the permanent and the impermanent. Her visual language reflects on contemporary life and the experience of time and space as continuously reshaped by a digitally saturated world.

Slice was part of Sze’s 2023 solo show, Timelapse, at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. The top level of the museum’s rotunda became an immersive environment of sculpture, painting, installation, and sound. The artist explained that "the thrill of not knowing how your environment is going to evolve around you is how we mark time in many ways, especially emotional time, especially psychological time."[1] The work is an intricate scaffolding construction made of wooden sticks. A collection of torn inkjet photographs, depicting details of natural scenes or landscapes, are displayed on one side, creating a sort of cascading effect in an inverted pyramidal shape. The installation is completed with three ladders of different colors and heights, and two video projectors displaying video directly onto the scaffolding. Other elements in this seemingly precarious construction include acrylic, ceramic, glass, plastic, tape, paper, and a plant, conferring a provisional quality as if the piece is in the process of being finished in the artist’s studio.

All the inkjet images in Slice are printed out from the video; the actual video is projected over them, allowing them to meet momentarily. "My interest in images right now," the artist said, "is this merging of the image in the object where we can’t remember if we’ve seen something in real life or we’ve seen it digitally."[2] Like other installation artists of her generation, Sze’s process-oriented practice embraces collecting, recycling, and the accumulation of different materials (artistic or ordinary) as an eloquent way to express and negotiate the fragmentation, contingency, and ephemerality of the human experience.



[1] Sarah Sze, quoted in "‘Sarah Sze: Timelapse’ at the Guggenheim," video, 2023 [guggenheim.org/video/see-sarah-sze-timelapse-at-the-guggenheim]

[2] Ibid.