Sarah Sze

By using common materials and objects that are readily available in local hardware and grocery stores for each of her site-specific installations, Sarah Sze’s negotiation with her own sense of scale and each given space has become increasingly urgent in recent years. However monumental her large forms, the intense networks of minute details found in her work announce their presence just as forcefully.

In this conversation Sze discusses at length the evolution of her growth as an artist, from her undergraduate experience at Yale University (1987-1991) and her four year break from school (1991-1995) during which she spent a year in Japan studying Ikebana and then directed a branch of Breakthrough, an educational nonprofit for low income public school students, to her graduate studies at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Each of these chapters goaded the development of her mature “style” without “Style.” (64 minutes)

Sarah Sze's installation at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (September 16–October 23, 2010) is also the topic of Sze’s visit to the Clocktower Gallery and its Art International Radio studios. A transcription of this conversation was published in the Brooklyn Rail both online and for its October 2010 issue.

•