Visual Art Professor Sarah Sze in Solo Exhibition ‘Night into Day’

Visual Art Professor Sarah Sze is featured in solo exhibition Night into Day in Paris, France. For her second solo show at Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Sze creates “an immersive installation that transforms the visitor’s perception and experience of Jean Nouvel’s iconic building.” Night into Day circles the circumference of the building and on two different levels.

“As an artist, I think about the effort, desire, and continual longing we've had over the years to make meaning of the world around us through materials. And to try and locate a kind of wonder, but also a kind of futility that lies in that very fragile pursuit,” Sze said about her art.

“Sze is best known for her intricate assemblages of everyday objects that blur the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture. For her upcoming exhibition, the artist will explore the way in which the proliferation of images— printed in magazines, gleaned from the Web, intercepted from outer space—fundamentally changes our relationship to objects, time and memory. Confusing the boundaries between inside and outside, mirage and reality, past and present, her new installation will bring together for the first time in her work the architectural, the sculptural and the filmic, altering the visitor’s perception of space and time,” Foundation Cartier stated.  

Night into Day plays with transparency of the architecture and creates a “magical lantern” for visitors to venture into. It is a fragile planetarium-like sculpture that seems to just float in the gallery space, 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 “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 imagery captures materials from daily life transformed to allow the viewers to experience “moving through the space” and “edit together through the act of seeing and reading images to create their own narrative of the work.”

The second space of the installation 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.”

“Sze’s installations seem to strive and ultimately recognize our failure to fully model the inscrutable concepts of time, space and memory.”

Sze’s Night into Day opens October 24, 2020 and runs through March 7, 2021. You can view the exhibition in person by online ticket reservation only. 

Sze is also featured in a group exhibition curated by Bruno Latour, Critical Zones, at ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Germany.  

The exhibition acts as an observatory of critical zones allowing visitors to familiarize themwelseves with the new situation. Over a period of several months this exhibition conceived as a scale model to simulate “the spatial novelty of this new land as well as the diversity of relations between the life forms inhabiting it.” The exhibition invites visitors to deal with the “critical situation of the Earth in various ways and to explore new does of coexistence between all forms of life,” KZM stated on the website. 

Sze’s piece Flash Point (Timekeeper) is one of the many “critical zones” and is now available to the public at ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Wednesday through Sunday. Check out their visitation guidelines for more information. 

Sze also participated a MOCA Toronto exhibition series, The City Is a Collection, as the first installment. Her exhibition Images in Debris is the first in a series of sculptures where light, movement, images, and architecture coalesce to make a singular, precarious equilibrium. Sze explores the way in which we experience the image-saturated contemporary world. 

Images in Debris is now open to the public and runs through October 4,2020. Advance ticket purchases are available. 

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Sze currently lives and works in New York. In 1999, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain was the first French institution to offer her a large solo show. Sze represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2013 and many of her works are held in the collections of prestigious institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, as well as The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Recent institutional exhibitions include Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark (2017); Centrifuge at the Haus der Kunst, Munich (2017- 2018); Afterimage at the Victoria Miro Gallery, London (2018); and the Gagosian Gallery, Paris (2020).

from Sarah Sze's 'Night into Day' installation

Sarah Sze walks Bruno Latour through "Night into Day"