Sarah Sze’s work addresses the proliferation of diverse information and multifarious objects which dominate contemporary life.
Sze incorporates elements of painting, architecture, and installation within her sculptures through which she investigates the value we place on objects and how objects ascribe meaning to the places and times we inhabit.
It occurs to me that Sze’s sculptures operate in 3D in similar ways to Hadid and Mehretu’s explosive 2D paintings and drawings.
In the images below we can see similarities with the early architectural paintings of Zaha Hadid (Figure 2) and the more global scope and concerns evident in the work of Julie Mehretu (Figure 3).
Fig. 2 Sze, Mural, 2nd Avenue Subway,14,000 sq feet of tile
http://art-nerd.com/newyork/sarah-sze-blueprint-for-a-landscape/
http://www.art21.org/images/sarah-sze/day-2005
Sze employs a constellation of everyday materials in her work ranging from found objects, plants, photographs and sculptures thereby creating vast encyclopaedic landscapes. Her work often transforms the architecture in which they are constructed by colonizing overlooked and peripheral spaces.
Sze sculptures record indexical trances of the experimental nature of her arts practice as it ebbs and flows – sometimes seemingly suspended in space; apparently quantifying and organising the universe in a personal system of order. Thus, Sze’s sculptures appear to represent both the dismantling of order and reassembling of an equally complex new order.
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/arts-entertainment/blog/2016/08/28/art-exhibits-fall-2016/print/
In the video: Measuring Stick (see link below), in which Sze discusses her work of the same name, she refers to Charles and Ray Eames influential film Power of 10 which played visually with the idea of measuring time and space by moving rapidly from micro to macro perspectives of the world.
In Measuring Stick, Sze makes a work which measures time and space through the moving image. Everything in the sculpture provides a measure of how we orient ourselves in space and time e.g. data live from NASA measuring the distance to the Voyager which is farthest measurable distance we have ever been able to measure.
The sculpture is arranged on a mirror, incorporates flowing water and videos of moving images projected onto small pieces of paper, so the whole piece suggests fragility and delicately shifting movement and transfomation.
Intention: explore my response to Essex University in the form of a 3D sculpture. An additional challenge would be to make the work kinaesthetic, or if static the work could incorporate projected moving images thereby providing additional dimensions and movement.
I contacted the university to ask whether they have a bank of lost property I could acquire. It would have been fascinating to make a sculpture out of disregarded or lost personal items. However, they do not have a bank of unclaimed items so my sculptures will be made from both found and made objects.
