Sarah Sze

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
Through November 18

In the tight series of rooms of Marianne Boesky Gallery the intricate, delicate contraptions of Sarah Sze’s installation nearly catch one unawares. Composed of the detritus of everyday life – cue tips, aspirins, wire, electronic transistors, gauze, clamps, plastic fans, dorm room clip-on desk lamps, notebook paper and empty lightbulb shells – Sze’s structures are hitched, clamped and glued together in ways that suggest their movement is precariously frozen, just before they surrender to external forces and either fall apart or spin furiously out of control.

The installation is one work of several parts: each made from bric-a-brac conglomerations of domestic furniture. They cling to the walls and corners of the rooms, stretched from one to the other by plant-like filaments, as if they were organic complexes – weeds or ivy – left to grow on the walls and ceilings and even out the window.

Sze’s work has often been described as if her materials were invariant from space to space, as if all that mattered were how the same sorts of objects were joined and fitted into the site at hand. But this approach misses the particular kind of experience her different installations can provoke.

Here, for example, it is the sense that we are witnessing a neglected bedroom or the recesses of an abandoned home, one like that of Dicken’s Miss Havisham, a chamber undisturbed by human hand, but slowly disintegrating. In the installation we see not so much the room’s furniture as the residues of its entropic dissolution, joined to the flotsam and jetsam of a swirling tide of transient household stuff.

Sze’s constructions suggest the remains of a ruin, objects that once were the anonymous and indifferent articles filling the space of a life, but now only odds and ends waiting to be swept away.




Jonathan Gilmore