For her second solo show at the Fondation Cartier, the artist Sarah Sze creates an immersive exhibition in dialog with Jean Nouvel’s building. With two new works, she offers a reverie around the proliferation of images transforming our relationship to our environment.
Playing with the transparency of the architecture Sze casts moving images onto the glass walls of the ground floor galleries, turning the building into a magic lantern as they collide, shift in scale, disappear and reemerge. Upon entering the building, visitors are drawn to a fragile planetarium-like sculpture that seems to float in the gallery space. The spherical sculpture is composed of photographs, objects, light, sound and video projections on torn paper, all held in an orchestrated suspension by a delicate scaffolding of bamboo and metal rods.
The imagery Sze collects shifts in scale from the vast to the minute. Much of the imagery depicts the timeless elements of nature: earth, fire, water; and natural processes: the movement of clouds, the eruption of a geyser or the growth of a plant. Other images, shot from an iphone or culled from the Internet, capture materials from daily life being transformed before our eyes: shaving chalk, cutting foam, burning wood - offering the viewer an experience of the tactile in our image-saturated world. Sze splices together disparate content that viewers, upon moving through the space, edit together through the act of seeing and reading images to create their own narrative of the work.
Circling the circumference of the building, the artwork leads to a second space where instead of looking up into a carved out sphere, visitors look down into a mirrored, concave, fragmented structure. Like a bowl of reflective water, the sculpture’s steel surfaces reflect slivers of surrounding images and objects – producing an unsettling and fractured landscape of shards and pieces, glimpses and refractions. A pendulum swings above the sculpture, barely touching its concave surface, carving out the negative space from above.
Inspired by age old scientific measuring devices such as the planetarium and the pendulum, designed to help map the earth and the cosmos, Sze’s installations seem to strive and ultimately recognize our failure to fully model the inscrutable concepts of time, space and memory.