Professor spins everyday items into an intricate artistic web

Sarah Sze doesn’t believe in minimalism. Or if she does, it has no place in her most recent installation, which opened last Thursday at the Tanya Bonkadar Gallery in Chelsea. Sze, a Columbia School of the Arts professor currently on sabbatical, constructs pieces that appear as intricate, gravity-defying cabinets of curiosities.

Her four pieces, each filling its respective gallery room with hundreds of strange and connected items, layer plain objects with altered ones, strings with electric cords, and wooden shelves with construction tools. Each piece emanates outward—its tentacles of wires or blue painter’s tape precariously connected to the ceiling, floor, and walls—like Sze’s personalized version of the Big Bang.

Indeed, these pieces seem like entire worlds unto themselves. Sze deals with nature in various ways, from repeating bits of moss and bowls of water to mechanically recreating the elements, like a small fan providing a breeze or a construction-style light shining, sun-like, from above. She also references the artistic process, particularly the building style of her own work, with hammers, ladders, and other heavy-duty materials. Paint and ink bottles sit in orderly rows, some of them completely covered in either gallery-white or black paint, while others are left in their original containers.

While a litany of references and meanings can be extracted from her work about the conundrum of art as life, institutional critique, religion, and the existence of God, it manages to maintain an air of simple pleasure. Visitors can’t help but enjoy the effortless wonder of a piece so intricate and intelligent, a piece endlessly fascinating from every perspective.

Part of the fun of looking at these pieces lies in the observation of others’ examinations and reactions. At the opening of the installation, artsy-looking “security guards” carefully extracted people who came too close to one of the delicate strings or precariously placed objects. One couldn’t help but feel a little like an admiring bull in an entirely strange china shop, waiting for some other animal on its third beer to knock into a piece and send the whole object tumbling down. (Luckily, this didn’t happen.)

Sze’s art in this context gives an intimate view of an established and lauded artist, whose works are housed in some of the most famous modern and contemporary museums in the world. Her status as one of today’s important artists is a rightful claim. Sze’s work can be looked at in the manner in which one might look at a Van Gogh, or any other master of composition and texture. There is the sheer beauty of the image as a whole, but upon a closer look, individual elements such as a brush stroke or small object give the piece a complex depth.

Yet, most of all, Sze is an expert at taking ordinary objects and recontextualizing them—that is, she takes everyday objects and creates something far more beautiful and spectacular than the world in which we usually see them.