Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is currently presenting an installation exhibition by Sarah Sze. Sze blends and incorporates many materials and objects such as prints of nature images, mirrors, paint, metals, plants, and household items. When you walk into the first the floor main room, the work seems like it is under construction, but some of the objects look like they are being destroyed. Nothing appears completed. There are half built structures, fallen paint from the ceiling, and shredded prints. The installation is located through the whole gallery, instead of one giant piece. When viewers wander surrounded by scatteredly but carefully located pieces, each one can find a different interpretation depending on their own perspective.
Any minor piece may stealthily navigate you to the other rooms. Usually when you leave from a bright and spacious room, you will step into a dark and cramped one. Despite the high contrast of rooms, the artist's style and themes remain consistently. In the dark, Sze emphasizes more how the sound and light interact with her installation by projecting slow motion of animals running or flying. It is a sensory experience of dialogues of time and space. The way to discover this intricately crafted installation reminds me how we encounter our contemporary world where overabundance information generated.
Your introduction to the contrast between the wide open space and the dark space of the two different exhibition rooms allows the readers to reminisce the gallery space once again. This comparison shows the definite differences but also the similarities in theme and the style of the artist Sarah Sze. Also it expresses the significance of the lighting and sound effects on her works’ ambiance. For the work installed in the wide open space, I felt like it was carefully choreographed work that is very well composed to a completion, despite its incomplete looks. The puzzling presentation invites the audience to freely roam around the works to an open interpretation.
ReplyDeleteHi Suhuikai,
ReplyDeleteI liked your description of the work and of how the visitor encounters these pieces spread around the gallery. Apart from the dark room, you didn't mention the differences between the gallery spaces - the room with the hammock on the second floor was so different, it could be interesting to mention that. I agree that Sze's work dialogues with time and space, but maybe you could develop your last thoughts a little bit. Her work seems to relate to our digital world, which consists of an abundance of fragmented information floating around space. Sze's complex and diverse compositions in space remind me of an attempt to organize these fragments.