Sunday, October 24, 2010

Sarah Sze

One of the highlights of our tour of New York's Chelsea galleries, indeed one of the highlights of our trip, was Sarah Sze's four installations at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, at 521 West 21 Street.
Sze uses thousands of everyday objects in her installations as you will see as you look closely. Here are some details of The Uncountables (Encyclopedia) on the main floor of the gallery.
The show is intensely immersive. You can't help but be drawn in. Electric lamps provide local illumination of spots of interest.
I love this box folded from a picture of mountains, forest and lake.
And these folded papers with their grey felt shadows.
Bill and I were thrilled and delighted wandering through the maze.
The total effect is dizzying, and intensely psychedelic 
Stones dipped in nail polish [?] cover the faces of the people in these photos.
In one of the rooms upstairs we found an entirely different installation: Landscape for the Urban Dweller (Horizon Line).
Sze's ability to transform ordinary objects is unsurpassed.
Speechless, we drink it all in...
...enchanted.
If you look closely, you'll see that's not a real concrete block floating overhead.
In another upstairs room, another ravishing installation: 360 (Portable Planetarium).
Bill took this picture of me approaching with caution, bewitched. I hope we've made it clear how exciting we found this show.
No, this isn't another Sze installation. It's a car park on West 21st Street, over toward 10th Avenue. After we left the gallery, the streets looked like more Sarah Sze. We can never look at construction hordings without imagining her eye and hand at work. Look, there is even a concrete block!

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