Sarah Sze: "Measuring Stick" | ART21 "Exclusive"

[Sarah Sze: "Measuring Stick"]

[VOICEOVER FROM FILM] We begin with a scene one-meter wide,

which we view from just one meter away.

Now, every ten seconds, we will look from
ten times father away

and our field of view will be ten times wider.

[SZE] In the Seventies, Charles and Ray Eames's
"Powers of Ten"

was the classic idea of a film

that could measure time and space.

That was something I always looked forward to seeing.

So, I wanted to make a work that was about

the measurement of time and space through
the moving image.

Everything in it is actually very much about

some kind of measuring stick

for how we orient ourselves in time and space.

I had been working on it as a film,

but I hadn't pulled up the volume on what
was it doing as a sculpture.

And I realized that, as a sculpture,

it needed to act more like this kind of fleeting image--

and it had to become more diaphanous,

it had to become more fractured,

it had to become much more light

and sort of defy gravity.

So the screens went away and they just became
pieces of paper.

And the top of the desk, I made a mirror.

This is actually, in some ways,

a replica of an editing desk.

I was thinking about the idea of scientist
image makers.

With the cheetah, I wanted to reference Muybridge.

And then I was thinking about Edgerton,

who created the strobe.

We take for granted,

they're really like scientific experiments
with images.

If you spend enough time with the piece,

you realize this isn't just a video.

It's actually live information coming to you
from the NASA site.

You see the distance to the Voyager

and it's the farthest measurable distance

that we have ever been able to measure.

Every object that's on the desk

is one of the objects that's being exploded.

So it has this quality of an experimental site.

You know, this idea of a model that's a scientific
model--

something that tries to actually measure a
kind of behavior,

I think, is something that I try and do in
the sculpture.

To have these extreme scale shifts in the
experience

in a very close proximity,

that is actually the way we perceive things.

I'm trying to do that constantly throughout.

It's such a volatile experience in every way

that things are teeter-tottering--

that you're constantly trying to find your balance.