Sarah Sze at Marianne Boesky

Although Sarah Sze has been a fixture on the international exhibition circuit for nearly a decade, her only previous solo gallery show occurred here in 2000. The site-specific nature of most of Sze's sculptures, which tend to infiltrate the nooks and crannies of their architectural environments, may partially account for this fact. One could argue that the clean, severe lines of the average white cube do not encourage the intricate rootedness of Sze's strongest works. But in this show, Sze found ways to alter the physical space of the gallery in order to better colonize it.

An example of this transformation was present in Proportioned to the Groove (all works 2005), where Sze employed a taut grid of colored string to bisect the entire main room. Originating from a corner of the floor, this web stretched across to the opposite edge of the ceiling, creating a sheltered, crawlspacelike area for the work's other sculptural elements. On the floor beneath the low end of this canopy, Sze marshaled everyday odds and ends into vaguely topographic configurations. Spills of light blue paint looked like lakes or rivers. Unraveled tape measures and extension cords resembled straight or winding roads. Clusters of pushpins and Styrofoam cups suggested buildings or gathering armies. Like the grid of string, these and other floor-bound objects seemed to radiate from the inaccessible far corner, where an electric lamp and a faint gurgling noise implied a source for the sculpture's fan-shaped sprawl.

The second component of this show, Still Life with Fish, was difficult to distinguish from the first because they both shared a wall that Sze had partially cut away to reveal the gallery's storage area. Here, behind the building's exposed beams, Sze stacked scores of small white jewelry boxes into precarious ziggurats. Countless other found objects (birdcages, funnels, goose-necked desk lamps) were also amassed to suggest a scale-model city under construction. Although a skeleton of the titular fish made an uncanny appearance, this sculpture was most memorable for confusing Sze's creative labors with the contents of the utility closet. One wondered, for example, if the yellow carpenter's level belonged to Sze or the gallery's art handlers.

A final work, Unravel, was a mainly white confection of foam-core strips, slivered paper plates and disassembled Chinese lanterns that descended from the ceiling in a vortex. The whole construction hummed and vibrated with a small electric fan wedged inside. Fragile and floating, this sculpture most resembled the lightweight clouds of accumulated stuff for which Sze has become so well known. But here, alone in the small rear room of the gallery, Unravel looked surprisingly portable, and generated the least dialogue with its surroundings.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group