A perpetual echo chamber insulated with replicates of replicates
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| © sarah sze, courtesy of the artist, tanya bonakdar gallery, new york,
and victoria miro gallery, london photo: tom powel imaging via Design Boom |
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| sarah sze triple point (gleaner), 2013 photograph of rock printed on tyvek, trees, moss, rocks, aluminum, wood, steel, bricks, stone, sandbags, outdoor pump, outdoor lights, mixed media dimensions variable © sarah sze, courtesy of the artist, tanya bonakdar gallery, new york, and victoria miro gallery, london photo: tom powel imaging |
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| sarah sze triple point (gleaner), 2013 photograph of rock printed on tyvek, trees, moss, rocks, aluminum, wood, steel, bricks, stone, sandbags, outdoor pump, outdoor lights, mixed media dimensions variable © sarah sze, courtesy of the artist, tanya bonakdar gallery, new york, and victoria miro gallery, london photo: tom powel imaging via Design Boom |
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| sarah sze triple point (pendulum), 2013 salt, water, stone, string, projector, video, pendulum, mixed media dimensions variable © sarah sze, courtesy of the artist, tanya bonakdar gallery, new york, and victoria miro gallery, london photo: tom powel imaging via Design Boom |
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| sarah sze triple point (planetarium), 2013 wood, steel, plastic, stone, string, fans, overhead projectors, photograph of rock printed on tyvek, mixed media 249 x 216 x 198 inches (632.5 x 548.6 x 502.9 cm) © sarah sze, courtesy of the artist, tanya bonakdar gallery, new york, and victoria miro gallery, london photo: tom powel imaging |
Sarah Sze creates sprawling environments composed of infinite found objects which respond to specific architectures. Commissioned for the US Pavilion at Venice by Bronx Museum Executivce Director Holly Block and independent curator Carey Lovelace, Sze's work Triple Point 2013, engages both the interior and exterior of the building, defying the 1930s Palladian-style architecture and moving beyond its ordered spatial boundaries by reorganizing reference points and establishing a constant rhythm of disorientation and reorientation. Lovelace describes Sze's ephemeral installations as striking a balance between spectacle and poetry.
The term "triple point" refers to the temperature and pressure at which a substance is at once a solid, a gas and a liquid in a stable equilibrium. In a similar way the multitude of objects assembled in Sze's work–Asprin pills, toothpicks, fake tools, fake rocks, books, string, fans and inumberable others–are in a constant state of becoming and becoming undone. The result is the viewer feels as if they have walked into the artists studio or a laboratory. Science, mathematical probability and scale and engineering are key to Sze practice. She sites the notion of the Random Walk, from probability theory which proposes that a drunk hanging on to a lamp post is just as likely to stumble forward as backward. The direction of each step is random and equally probable. The same idea can be read in Sze's seemingly endless sprawling structures and chaotic assemblages which appear to have no apparent order, no ideological imperative, no vertical bias, no formal unity, and which challenge that of the building in which they are housed.
Paddy Johnson (Art Fag City) theorises that "the show is both a production-site and graveyard
for the relics of an unnamed religion." Johnson imagines members of this cult worshiping
reproduction technology and mass-produced objects. Johnson's reading departs the official press release text which states that the work, "engages the history of a building and the colonization of
peripheral space. It seeks equilibrium in a chaotic contemporary world." But I like Johnson's approach particularly the phrase "Studio/worship room" and the description of the building's front entrance which she writes is littered with remnants from an unnamed
ceremony."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/31/arts/design/at-venice-biennale-sarah-szes-triple-point.html?_r=0
http://www.bronxmuseum.org/files/venice_artinfo.pdf
http://www.bronxmuseum.org/files/venice_newyorker.pdf
http://www.designboom.com/art/sarah-sze-represents-the-us-at-venice-art-biennale-2013/
http://www.artfagcity.com/2013/05/31/triple-point-sarah-sze-at-the-united-states-pavilion/
http://www.designboom.com/art/sarah-sze-represents-the-us-at-venice-art-biennale-2013/
http://www.artfagcity.com/2013/05/31/triple-point-sarah-sze-at-the-united-states-pavilion/
