Sarah Sze

By John Zotos

March 9, 2024

Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas

Three individual but related installations comprise Sarah Sze’s immersive, site-specific exhibition. As intended, they literally inhabit the building’s architecture. These works are the result of a conversation held between Sze and the curators that started seven years ago after she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2013. As time passed, her work continued to evolve. What eventually emerged for this exhibition is markedly different than what began the original conversation.

Sarah Sze, “Cave Painting,” 2024, inkjet prints on paper mounted on tyvek, string, clamps, aluminum and mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Kevin Todora

In subsequent years came the pandemic, and several exhibitions before and after, including Sze’s “Timelapse” (2023) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The exhibitions showed how the artist grew and modified her artistic practice, evident here in her most recent and mature work. In it painting once again becomes part of her process.

Sze investigates and displays everyday life as an accumulation of objects and experiences, the passing of time and how our perception of the world changes with it. These pieces combine painting, assemblage, photography, video projections, sound, and both analog and digital media. Her work often mulls over the question of authenticity as a competition between analog and digital modes of representation, encouraging us to decide which mode to privilege. For Sze, who has forcefully stated, “more pixels is not better,” the choice is quite clear. 

In the entrance gallery “Cave Painting” stretches from floor to ceiling such that a viewer walking into the center approaches the piece while also observing the garden outside. Sze asked the curators for pictures of the garden, which she used to create a painted representation of it. This she reproduced as inkjet prints, torn by hand and attached to strings that support the images. An assembled collage of trees, sky, clouds, sunsets, and the artist’s hands are just a few among the plethora of images here. Almost a series of perforated scrims with several layers, the piece includes objects from the studio: hooks, tape, pens, wire, and matchboxes that anchor the strings to the floor. From the opposite side, when viewed as if entering from the garden, one sees more blue skies, with accents of white. 

Sarah Sze, “Slow Dance,” 2024, paper, string, aluminum, video projection and mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Kevin Todora

In the main gallery, also vertically oriented from floor to ceiling, is “Slow Dance,” a video installation with multiple projectors. It takes up the entire space as an unreliable mirror image of itself. A total of 722 pieces of paper attached to strings acts as a screen that captures the projected images. They form a parabola where the strings of either side cascade down from the ceiling at each of the far ends of the gallery, not quite meeting at the center, where an open space remains.

You can occupy this middle area, bathed in a bombardment of video images coming from both directions. At the far end of each side of the gallery one can see the outlines of the screens from the projection of light on the other side. They form white irregular geometric shapes distorted by the distance and the oblique angles.

A low-level soundtrack of someone humming provides a meditative aural complement to the dark room and the lively images of flora, fauna, and landscapes that populate the video feed over the duration of the cycle. Sometimes the projections appear to be the same, but they are staggered and at times completely differ from one another. If you try to impose symmetry to the projections, you soon realize that each side has its own identity.

 Sarah Sze, “Slow Dance” (detail), 2024, paper, string, aluminum, video projection and mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Kevin Todora

For the artist, the lack of hierarchy in “Slow Dance” leads to moments of discovery and the construction of meaning over time as a product of experience. There is a level of intimacy related to how the piece is experienced that allows for how you can relate to the piece. It is an engagement that underscores our interior lives. Sze creates a kind of longing as the piece proceeds, being that we never see the whole picture at any given time.

Where “Cave Painting” and “Slow Dance” operate on an upward, vertical register, the third installation, “Love Song,” forgoes height in exchange for a horizontal, 360-degree projection of several cameras from a centrally located tripod. Unlike the other two structures, “Love Song,” in its entirety, is a kinetic art object. Surrounded by the aluminum branches of a sort of tree in the center of the room, the tripod and cameras project images as the apparatus rotates clockwise on its axis. We walk around, as our shadows are projected upon the surrounding walls, perhaps completing the work of art in good Duchampian conceptualist fashion. The piece radiates images from a rotating central axis so that there are always images on every wall at any given time. 

 Sarah Sze, “Love Song,” 2024, inkjet prints on paper mounted on tyvek, string, clamps, aluminum and mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Kevin Todora

Splattered paint is strewn in bright splotches on the gallery floor as if it came from the tripod, suggesting a painter’s studio. This piece engages the idea of painting as a mediated video projection, which again asks the viewer to ponder analog and digital means of representation. This time, however, the question is pondered through the lens of painting. The images themselves are sourced from photographs of a garden. Here they are deconstructed, reconfigured anew, and put into motion, blending in with shadows cast from the tree branches that completely surround the tripod. Sometimes an image from “Slow Dance” pops up, inviting us to put together a relationship between the two.

The artist acknowledges that the inspiration for this piece in part resides in her interest in Russian Constructivist Gustav Klutsis, in particular his designs for propaganda kiosks intended to disseminate information via sound and projected images as a political tool. 

Sze has replaced the politics with a statement about the increasingly complicated, mediated, nature of our reality. In all three pieces, her focus on lived experience in real space and real time engages with depicting the human condition in our current situation and its attendant complexity.

John Zotos is an art critic and essayist based in Dallas.