Art AV Club: Sarah Sze

In this Art AV Club we look at the works of Sarah Sze and her use of every day objects to talk about memory and time.

I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole recently, like you do. I took an online class and one of the bonus materials was a video about Cy Twombly. After I watched it, I wondered if there were videos on other Abstract Expressionists. And just like all trips down the YouTube rabbit hole, I surfaced several hours later awed by the amazing content and looking for snacks.

Social media doesn’t allow for easy sharing of this kind of material. So I decided to make it a recurring feature on my blog. And just like that, Art AV Club was born! On Mondays, I’ll post videos of or about artists. I’ll share a bit about why what they do intrigues me. I hope you’ll go on this journey with me. American contemporary artist Sarah Sze is my pick this week for Art AV Club.

This is going to be my last Art AV Club for a while. I’ve got several commissions going on right now and I need to take some writing off of my plate. I’ll undoubtedly circle back around to these but for now I’m gonna push the pause button.

Sarah Sze at TED

Listening to Sarah Sze talk about objects and memory is fascinating.

Painting or sculpture or installation?

Listen to Sarah Sze talk about her work called “Seamless.”

What is memory?

That’s a question that comes up a lot when you hear Sarah Sze speak. Her explorations of this space are both incredibly interesting to me while also being very difficult to hold in my head for any length of time because of the complexity of the ideas. I really really love how her vision of looking forward creates these futuristic landscapes for viewers to interact with.

I think my work has looked at this from the perspective of looking backward into the past for memories and her work challenges me to look into the future for those images to build memories. Even when I am most attempting to look forward, like in my handprints series, it is covered in shades of the past.

Go exploring on your own

I hope you enjoyed this Art AV Club. Sze’s website is a trove of gorgeous images. If you are intrigued by her work as I am, then you won’t want to pass up looking at the site. If there’s an artist you’d like my take on, drop me a note and I’ll put them on the list!