Detail of Lost Image Standing (Fragment Series) from the installation Second Studio at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Production still from the series ART21 Exclusive. © ART21, Inc. 2016. Cinematography: Andrew Whitlatch.
“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.” — Sarah Sze
Today’s ART21 Exclusive features Sarah Sze expressing her desire to have a tactile relationship with materials in a world saturated with digital imagery. In describing today’s visual culture, Sze says, “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.”
For her 2015 exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Sze amplified and countered this contemporary experience through her installation Second Studio. By arranging paint skins, torn paper images, and other materials such as wood, thread, and rocks, Sze explored our fragmented relationship to illusionistic images by focusing our attention on each object’s materiality. “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.”
CREDITS: Producer: Ian Forster. Consulting Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Ian Forster. Editor: Morgan Riles. Camera: John Marton & Andrew Whitlatch. Sound: Ian Forster. Artwork Courtesy: Sarah Sze & Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Special Thanks: Mike Barnett & Lissa McClure.
ART21 Exclusive is supported, in part, by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; 21c Museum Hotel, and by individual contributors.
