Sarah Sze: How We See the World | ART21 "Exclusive"

[Sarah Sze: How We See the World]

I'm really interested in this, kind of, pendulum swing.

This kind of desire to be able to feel and touch

and smell materials.

And then the other end of the pendulum being

the reality that we have a distance from materials

because we have so much time with images.

That time with images, I think,

is very different than any other time with images

that I've known in my lifetime.

And I think it's changing radically with each generation.

You know, you don't know the authorship of
an image when it gets to you.

You can manipulate it

and you can send it.

It's a kind of images-as-debris.

We've learned to read images very quickly.

So all of the images that are in the gallery show

have to do with images that make you feel

as if they could be anywhere at any time.

Images of landscape

shoot you into, kind of, a vast time and space.

It changes your sense of time--

in the seeing.

This room, to me, is really about the intersection

of painting and sculpture.

I wanted to, sort of, pull out everything that was

nameable in my work

and have people look at fragments

of both paint and images coming together--

filtering together--

and then falling apart.

When you come in,

you start to see things as holes.

All of the edges of the work sort of

line up in very different angles.

You actually see the room sort of

almost come together

in terms of these kind of floating frames.

So you have this experience in time and space

of not knowing when a work begins--

when a work ends.

This is how we see the world.

We don't see things in white boxes.

How do we just talk about the luxuriousness
of the material--

not material representing something else.

How does paint behave in space?

How does it feel? How does it dry?

How does it adhere?

When you see paper as a pile,

you sort of question what's happened to an image.

That's a place where the materiality in the sculpture

and the image, I think, actually,

they meet.

That kind of behavior--

that kind of tactility--

the volume on its value, I think,

is turned up.

Because we have so much illusion,

but we don't have touch

and we don't have taste, and we don't have smell.

We don't have that intimacy with images.