We see leftovers of Sze’s thoughts. Strewn paint, twigs left at a teetering balance, a wide plank of wood left on the lap of a chair as if temporary and forgotten. Perhaps the placement is a remnant of distraction, meant to resemble our behavior in a society overwhelmed by information. In the gallery are torn photographs, patched borders with negatived spaces and blacked out newspapers. A playground of implied lines. There is deliberation in the type of objects, the precarious nature and architecture of their placement.
She has physicalized a digital landscape. We can easily be subdued by all the tangible data, the pixel by pixel displacement of surfaces. It seems as though we came upon the work amidst the artist’s process. We have no sequence of time or hierarchy of organization as we enter the installation. Like our digital worlds, she flattens time and allows us to explore spatially. Her installation at first chaotic, becomes a realization of the tender human nuance in a tactile system of lines and organization.
In the pandemonium of information, one can seek peace in the personal order that Sze has created for and left for us.
I want to begin by complimenting your language, which is both as calculated and as playful as Sze's work. (I was particularly charmed by your usage of the word "playground".)
ReplyDeleteMy response to Sze's work was, at most, informed by a surface-level appreciation of the frenetic energy communicated through her placement and manipulation of the found objects and other raw structural elements. Your analysis of this show, however, provided me with a deeper understanding of how the installations can be contextualized among a more diverse canon of artistic styles and purposes.