Зе, Сара
サラ・セー
triple point

source: nytimes

VENICE — The Biennale doesn’t open to the public until Saturday, but the art world arrived early for a peek. Artists, curators and creators responsible for this vast assemblage of exhibitions here have been on hand to meet, greet and explain their work.

Among them is Sarah Sze, 44, the installation artist representing the United States. Ms. Sze (pronounced ZEE) has become something of a personality around the neighborhood near the Giardini, the shaded gardens that have been at the heart of the Biennale for more than 100 years. As she walked the street, inconspicuously dressed in black jeans and a dark blazer, newsstand operators and restaurant owners waved and greeted her by name. Many of the neighborhood’s merchants and residents are recipients of her work: sculptural simulations of rocks and boulders that adorn rooftops, balconies and shop windows.

Ms. Sze, who is known for creating site-specific environments from everyday objects like toothpicks, sponges, light bulbs and plastic bottles, arrived here in a snow storm on March 28 and has been hoarding, foraging and installing ever since.

Anyone reading a list of items in her complex installation might think it was for a scavenger hunt or what to pack for an unusual Outward Bound trip. There are paint cans and ladders; sticks and aluminum rods; branches and espresso cups; tape measures; bags of sand; gaffer’s tape; lamps; screw drivers; clay as well as plastic tubs; napkins that come with Illy coffee; even a sleeping bag — and that’s just a bit of it.

Called “Triple Point,” her exhibition is about “orientation and disorientation,” Ms. Sze said. Holly Block, the director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Carey Lovelace, a critic and independent curator, proposed Ms. Sze for the Biennale and organized the exhibition, with the Bronx Museum acting as the commissioning institution.

“Sarah is part of a new generation who is returning to Modernist ideas, but developing them in a new way,” Ms. Lovelace said on Tuesday outside the Biennale’s United States pavilion.

Ms. Sze is asking questions of her audience: “What objects in your life have value, and how is value created?” she explained. “I wanted to show objects that we know and have seen in our bag or on the shelf of a store which have the residue of emotion.”

First she tackled the pavilion’s ivy-covered facade. Though the plants may appear to have always been there, they haven’t. “Some of the ivy is fake,” she said. “And the real stuff I trained to grow up the building.”

But that’s not the first thing you notice. Consuming the courtyard is a wacky installation assembled from aluminum rods and ladders; caution tape and water bottles; sand bags; espresso cups; branches; and faux rocks. The combination outside is in stark contrast to the 1930s Palladian-style pavilion itself. Designed by Delano & Aldrich, it features stately columns and strict symmetry.

“I wanted to throw things off-center,” Ms. Sze said. So she changed the circulation, making visitors enter through the side door rather than the formal front.

Each room features a different installation assembled from found objects. In the last room, the artist plays with perception, mirroring the walls and creating the illusion of a lower ceiling by installing a grid of string overhead. “It’s how to make intimate space at a biennale,” Ms. Sze said.

In this room she created an artist’s studio filled with materials that went into her installation, as well as a crumpled sleeping bag. Visitors can also see out to the courtyard installation. “It’s the idea of looking out the window,” Ms. Sze said, adding that she had been partly inspired by paintings by Matisse and Vermeer.

When the Biennale ends on Nov. 24, the installation may be headed to the Bronx Museum; officials there said plans are under discussion.
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source: bronxmuseumorg

SARAH SZE

Since the late 1990s, the artist Sarah Sze has composed ephemeral installations that penetrate walls, hang from ceilings, and burrow into the ground. Whether installed in a gallery, a domestic interior, or on a street corner, Sze’s immense yet intricate site-specific works both respond to and transform their surroundings.

Born in Boston in 1969, Sze has been the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2003, a Radcliffe Fellowship in 2005, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 1999. Most recently, the Asia Society in New York presented a solo show of her work, “Sarah Sze: Infinite Line” (December 2011-March 2012). Her installation for the High Line in Manhattan, Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat), is an elaborate “metropolis” of perspectival architectural models bisected by the High Line’s path itself. The piece won a 2012 International Association of Art Critics award for “Best Project in a Public Space.”

Sze’s practice exists at the intersection of sculpture, painting, and architecture. It demonstrates the artist’s formal interest in light, air, and movement, as well as an intuitive understanding of color and texture. Sze utilizes a myriad of everyday objects in her installations, ranging from cotton buds and tea bags to water bottles and ladders, light bulbs and electric fans. Presented as leftovers or traces of human behavior, these items, when released from their commonplace duty, possess a vitality and ambition within the work. Sze’s careful consideration of every shift in scale between the humble and the monumental, the throwaway and the precious, the incidental and the essential, solicits a new experience of space, disorienting and reorienting the viewer at every turn.