Jul 23, 2024

Sarah Sze’s Disappearing Act

Learn more about Sarah Sze’s encyclopedic sculpture and how it teeters on the edge of transition.

An image of Sarah Sze's sculpture Disappearing Act (2012)

Sarah Sze, Disappearing Act, 2012. Mixed media, glass, stainless steel, marble, foam core, string, rocks, LEDs, eggshells, toothpicks, wood, giclee on archival paper, bamboo, tennis ball, Overall: 299.7 × 396.2 × 182.9 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario. Gift of the Shlesinger-Walbohm Family Collection, 2020. © Sarah Sze. 2020/147

As you experience the exhibition Bright Signs: Spotlight on Video Art at the AGO, you may be surprised to come across a sculpture nestled between video installations.

On view at the AGO, Bright Signs features cinematic video installations and neon sculptures from 11 leading contemporary artists across three decades, all selected from the AGO Collection. With many works in the exhibition being on view at the AGO for the first time, the exhibition explores critical social issues such as power, visibility, and perceptions of history.

Given the dynamic nature of Sarah Sze’s work, the choice to feature Disappearing Act (2012) in this video-based exhibition is clear. Receiving her BA from Yale University in 1991 and her MFA from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 1997, Sze has built her career challenging the static nature of sculpture. Departing from the sturdy and robust nature of sculpture, Sze’s works are precarious, elaborate, and caught in a moment of suspension. Sze represented the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale with her evolving installation Triple Point (2013) and currently teaches as a professor of visual art at Columbia University. Her current exhibition Sleepers (2024), on view in Venice, is crafted around capturing a continual state of transition.

Almost mobile-like, the precarious nature of Disappearing Act makes it seem like it can fall apart at any moment. Much of Disappearing Act is connected simply through string as Sze plays with the physics of tension. Half of the sculpture is supported by a glass pane stacked on top of a cardboard box, a folded blanket, and foam. While you may notice that suspended elements of the sculpture move with the breeze, Disappearing Act seems to be frozen in a moment between movement and stillness.

Sze’s works are often described as encyclopedic, her layered sculptures reflecting on information proliferation and systems of order as visual narratives become increasingly unattributed, distributed, and quickly shared in our modern day. Building an immersive environment, her works aim to alter our sense of time, place, and memory.

Sze aims to blur boundaries between the digital and the analogue, the permanent and impermanent, and mediums such as painting, sculpture, sound and video. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Sze said she feels like a work is done when “it’s at this stage of teetering,” and when it feels like “your foot is still in the air and hasn’t landed yet.”

An image of Sarah Sze's sculpture Disappearing Act (2012). It is a close up of a section of the sculpture featuring orbs made with eggshells, toothpicks, and paper amongst various white cuboids filled with torn blue paper

Sarah Sze, Disappearing Act (detail), 2012. Mixed media, glass, stainless steel, marble, foam core, string, rocks, LEDs, eggshells, toothpicks, wood, giclee on archival paper, bamboo, tennis ball, Overall: 299.7 × 396.2 × 182.9 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario. Gift of the Shlesinger-Walbohm Family Collection, 2020. © Sarah Sze. 2020/147

Disappearing Act teeters between balanced and unbalanced as it faces the looming possibility and threat of transition. The fluid state of Sze’s sculpture is further emphasized by the wide array of items she incorporates: eggshells, glass cups, twigs, a tennis ball, rocks, an empty water bottle, toothpicks, and a pair of black socks. The balance between organic and manmade objects reflects the process of erosion, natural decay, and the passage of time. Sze uses both found and mass-produced objects in her work to question how items are valued, remembered, and experienced.

On Sze’s work, Debbie Johnsen, Exhibition Curator, shares “Sarah Sze’s artworks challenge traditional notions of sculpture. Her incredibly complex and dynamic sculptural installations invoke a sense of harmony among the various elements, but also a sense of precarity as we know if one element falls out of the place, the entire sculpture would crumble.”

Experience Sarah Sze’s transitory work in Bright Signs: Spotlight on Video Art on view now on Level 5 of the AGO. This exhibition is curated by Debbie Johnsen, Manager, Modern and Contemporary Collections and features artworks that will form the cornerstone for the expansion of the new Dani Reiss Modern and Contemporary Gallery, starting construction in 2024.