Sarah Sze: Emotional Time | Art21 "Extended Play"

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- This is one of the most
radical architectures built.

Over 70% of this building is a void.

It's the air, it's the
light, it's the tilt.

It's all of these things

that really create an
entirely new inner world

when you enter this museum.

You see how people behave differently.

They move differently.

Your whole sense of
time and space changes.

How do you make a piece that
helps me, helps the viewer,

helps the building understand itself anew?

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When you come up here,

you start to see this thing
called the River of Images.

The River of Images
goes around in one loop.

Moving images seem

like they're just bleeding
into architecture.

The bay is this image maker.

It's making images through these shadows,

the shadows of the sculpture, my shadow,

and two images moving together.

So it's like a live film
and this is total chance.

This will happen once every month.

The reels are in different
speeds, so the moving images,

they collide at different times,

and then as you come around
and you see this sculpture,

if you go to the top of the sculpture,

it really draws attention to
this incredible oculus ceiling.

This is an important idea that
people would go in the bay

and look out, 'cause you
never stand where the art is.

You can imagine,

what's it like to be a
painting hung in this space?

That's what you see.

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I use very mundane
materials to really push

at that question

of how you imbue value
in inanimate objects.

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People are very careful around the work.

There's a sense that any
wind could just topple it.

That's really the cusp that
I'm interested in meeting

where things are right at
the point of coming together

but really at this fragile point

where you could imagine them
falling apart at any time.

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Looking at it, you can
try and trace a history

of how it's made.

It's all there for you.

You can see the clamps,
you can see the props.

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Every artwork is a timekeeper.

It's a time capsule of
what it means to be alive.

To go see an ancient artwork

and realize this was
touched by human beings,

this was seen by centuries of people,

and I am now having a conversation

with all of those human
beings through an object.

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Anything in this museum is here

because hundreds of people

have shepherded that work through.

The artist is just one piece of that.

I'm really grateful for
the people I work with.

When I was young, I look
at my painter friends

and I would say they
spend the whole day alone.

(Sarah chuckling)

Now that I have children, and I teach,

and I have older parents,
being alone in a room

with a painting is an incredible pleasure.

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For this show,

I wanted to only have paintings
bigger than your body.

The paintings became portals
to interior landscapes.

They tell us about how
we see inside our heads,

how memories are collected,

how they're lost, how they're
misinterpreted, reinterpreted.

There's a longing for interior images

because there's so many exterior images

that that balance has changed.

Like in my generation,
if you asked me like,

what did you look like as a child?

There's like four pictures
that my parents framed

and they put on the wall,

and that's what I think I looked like.

You know, with my children,
there's, you know, a day,

there's 70 pictures.

We have a really different
sense of the image.

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During the pandemic, it was
very hard to measure time.

For most of us, our
serendipitous interaction

with people was cut down dramatically.

Those moments have emotional intensity.

What you were wearing,
what it smelled like,

what it sounded like,

all of those things helped us mark time.

Art can show you how time
is marked through emotion

like no other medium.

Because that's how we as
human beings measure time.

I think when I'm on my deathbed,

I will think emotionally
about the timeline of my life

and art is a thing that gives
us this way of seeing that.

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