Sarah Sze, Twice Twilight, exhibition Night into Day, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, 2020. Photo © Luc Boegly
Since the late 1990s, Sze has created intricate assemblages of everyday objects that blur the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture. In the last five years, she has reintroduced video into her work to explore the growing influx of images in our daily lives and examine how their proliferation has fundamentally changed our relationship to objects, time, and memory.
Twice Twilight and Tracing Fallen Sky, created specifically for this exhibition, are the latest works from Sze’s Timekeeper series, begun in 2015, which investigates the image and the increasing overlaps in our experience of the virtual and material worlds. The planetarium and the pendulum, age-old scientific tools designed to map the cosmos and trace the earth’s rotation, inspired the structure of these sculptures. Sze has long been interested in scientific models as tools to measure time and space and to explain the natural world.
With dramatic shifts in scale—from the vast trajectory of the sun, to the minute action of lighting a match—the artist conveys the mystery and complexity inherent in our constant attempts to measure and model time and space. In contemplating the essence of these concepts, Sze reveals both the wonder and the futility behind our efforts to understand what will always remain just beyond our grasp.
