Redefining Space: Artist Sarah Sze

Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Lecture Series Presented November 2, 2016 at the Nasher Sculpture Center in collaboration with the University of North Texas College of Visual Arts and Design. “How do we define what a piece of art is? How does something become valuable? What does it say about our culture?” These are the questions that this year’s Nasher Lecture Series speaker, Sarah Sze, asks herself in the process of creating her immense yet intricately designed artworks that challenge the boundaries of sculpture, painting, and architecture. Sze is well known for incorporating common household items into her work in order to question the value of the objects we use and discard every day. In her day-to-day life, she collects things as varied as tea bags, water bottles, light bulbs, and electric fans and utilizes them to add an autobiographical element to her work. Together, all of the items create a narrative of contemporary human experience and habits that resonates with viewers in unique and personal ways. With these everyday objects, Sze almost always creates teeming, site-specific sculptures with the aim of redefining space and altering the way that quotidian objects are perceived. Sze’s finished work is characterized by a quality of organized chaos that challenges the static nature of sculpture. The artist Richard Serra has likened her lace-like and seemingly disordered work to “seeing Twombly or Pollock in space.” This veritable explosion of everyday objects can seem arbitrary, but the ordering of the objects, while seemingly random, is actually quite precise. Sze spends up to a month scattering photographs, rocks, bottles, and paint across the floor, hanging poles, ladders, and string from the ceiling, and building delicate structures on top of tables, desks, and shelves, all while maintaining a focus on the flow of the exhibit and how the location of all the contingent parts will affect the visitor’s experience. Walking into a room taken over by Sze’s work is an immersive experience with parts of the artwork over head, next to your feet, and hanging on the walls. The fractured yet overwhelming feeling that her completed works evoke attempts to convey the fragmented and immense flow of constant information in modern life. Sze has had a successful career spanning twenty-five years. Notably, she was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 2003 and represented the United States at the 55th Venice Biennale with her installation “Triple Point” in 2013. Sze recently mounted exhibitions at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London and the Tonya Bonakdar Gallery in New York. www.nashersculpturecenter.org