Sarah Sze Depicts The Timeless Elements of Nature Through A ‘Night into Day’ Exhibition

Playing with the transparency of architecture, Sarah Sze casts moving images onto the glass walls of the ground floor galleries, turning each building her work accommodates into a magic lantern as they collide, shift in scale, disappear and re-emerge. Scheduled for launch on 24^th October 2020, the up-coming ‘Night into Day’ immersive installation will run up till 7^th March 2021 – marking the internationally acclaimed artist’s second solo show at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.

Sarah Sze, Triple Point (Pendulum), 2013 Salt, water, stone, string, projector, video, pendulum, mixed media. Dimensions variable. © Sarah Sze © Photo Tom Powel Imaging

Revered for her intricate assemblages of everyday objects which blur the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture, Sarah Sze’s latest exhibition will explore the way in which proliferation of images— printed in magazines, gleaned from the Web, intercepted from outer space—fundamentally change our relationship with objects, time and memory. With no clear in-and-outdoor space, the installation tightropes a thin line between the concepts of mirage and reality, as well as, the past and present.

Featuring a fragile planetarium-like sculpture, 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, Sarah Sze’s out-of-this-world experience begins upon entrance. Shifting the scale from the vast to the minute, ‘Night into Day’ depicts the timeless elements of nature, including, earth, fire, water; and natural processes such as, the movement of clouds, the eruption of a geyser or the growth of a plant.

Shot either from an iPhone or culled from the Internet, the installation captures materials from daily life and transforms before our eyes, offering viewers an experience of the tactile in our image-saturated world, whilst splicing together disparate content that viewers, upon moving through the space, edit together through the act of seeing and reading, to create their own narrative of the work.

Installation prototype in the studio for the exhibition Night Into Day at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2019. © Sarah Sze Photo © Sarah Sze Studio

Covering the entire circumference of Jean Nouvel’s iconic building, the artwork, accompanied by an augmented reality project, 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, as a pendulum swings overhead, barely touching the structure’s concave surface, whilst carving out the negative space from above.

Inspired by age old scientific measuring devices, Sarah Sze’s installations seem to strive and ultimately recognize our failure to fully model the inscrutable concepts of time, space and memory.