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| Sarah Sze, Afterimage, Yellow Blow Out (Painting in its Archive), 2018 |
Sarah Sze: Afterimage is at
Victoria Miro Gallery, until 28 July 2018
From Victoria Miro website:
An exhibition featuring two new site-specific works: Images in Debris,
an installation of images, light, sound, film, and objects, that seeks
to transform the visitor's perception and experience of the first-floor
gallery; and Afterimage, an environment of wall-based works in
the ground-floor gallery that replicates aspects of the artist’s studio
and includes elements made in situ as well as images collected, gathered
and discarded in the process of making the work. In both works Sze
continues her decades-long exploration of the ways in which the
proliferation of images – printed in magazines and newspapers, gleaned
from the Web and television, intercepted from outer space, and
ultimately imprinted on our conscious and unconscious selves –
fundamentally changes our relationship to physical objects, memories and
time.
Constellatory, monumental, intimate and immersive,
Images in Debris,
2018, is the latest iteration of a major series of sculptures that
study the image in motion... In these expansive works,
Sze explores our sense of time, place and distance, and the construction
of memory, through the never-ending stream of images - personal,
searched, researched and found - that we negotiate daily. While Sze has
worked with moving image since the late-1990s, these installations
represent an evolution in her
practice, where light, movement, images and architecture coalesce into a single, precarious equilibrium.
Simultaneously a sculptural installation and a functional projection tool,
Images in Debris lends
equal weight to images and objects, breaking out of the flat screen
into the space of architecture, and experimenting with the edges between
the two. At its centre is an L-shaped desk, inspired by the artist's
own studio desk, which, acting like a projector at the centre of a
planetarium, casts images on to torn sheets of paper attached to an
intricate structure built on the desktop, and across the gallery walls.
Moving and scanning the architecture at different speeds, the work
unfolds like a series of experiments that seem to alter our sense of
gravity, scale and time. Sze's work has often referred to instruments of
measure and mapping as well as the worlds they strive to evaluate. Part
constellation, part debris field - a place of both networked and
fractured relationships -
Images in Debris is analytic of the
ways in which we experience the image-saturated contemporary world.
Poised at the intersection of the material and the virtual, it offers
multiple screens or windows on to moments by turns public and private.
The imagery itself - much of it shot on the artist's iPhone - often
points to its own materiality or changes in material state. A forest
burns. Water spills or splashes - a reference to Harold Edgerton's
famous 1936 photograph
Milk-Drop Coronet and to the earlier
experiments of Muybridge and Marey. Edits, meanwhile, draw attention to
processes of decay or transformation in a virtual sense - succumbing to
pixilation, becoming ghostly like digital 'snow'. In tandem, altered
states of consciousness are suggested by imagery such as the motif of a
child asleep. Within the slow loop of the imagery - so long that repeats
take days rather than hours - beginnings and endings are willfully
suspended. Here, Sze applies to sculpture the filmic idea of the edit,
where meaning occurs in the splice, and the viewer, moving through the
space, creates their own narrative arc.
[Read full text,
here]
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| Sarah Sze, Installation view of Afterimage at Victoria Miro |
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| Sarah Sze, Afterimage, Rainbow Disturbance (Painting in its Archive), 2018 |
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| Sarah Sze, Images in Debris, 2018 |
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| Sarah Sze, Images in Debris, 2018 (detail) |
Links
Nick Compton, "
American artist Sarah Sze pulls apart her creative process",
Wallpaper
Sarah Sze: Afterimage [video, 3'50"] Frieze.com
Sarah Sze: Afterimage [Victoria Miro online catalogue]
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