Rewind 2007: Sarah Sze (Victoria Miro, London)

Tilting Planet

A Certain Slant

Sarah Sze’s constructions are a kind of cornucopian vision of ordinary things, transformed by their wayward proliferation and combination, given new life by Sze’s sorcerer’s-apprentice touch; coloured cords and yarns stretched like laser-beams, plastic bottles bisected to appear half-submerged in the concrete floor, armies of map pins marching through bivouacs of writing paper, desk lamps, carpet tiles, a sea of colour-swatch cards – things that in isolation are the useful stuff of office life, or the working world of DIY. Sze takes all these colourful manifestations of plentiful, democratic consumerism and releases them from their usual duties, choreographing them into theatrical displays full of little dramas and narratives. Admittedly there’s a certain cuteness to all this – it’s hard not to be amused as you watch a plumb-line wafted by a desk fan, its point dragging through a mound of white powder. But such charms are a small part of Sze’s bigger project of sculptural re-invention. Constantly playing with one’s sense of scale, Sze lets you examine a cluster of objects as if in a museum display, then throws objects into play that suggest massive architectural installations. Among the manufactured things are elements of the natural world – slender branches here, a flower there. Sze presents this as a hybrid of urbanism and ecology, in which even nature becomes part of the synthetic order. Yet whether there’s an environmentalist moral beneath is less clear – Sze’s celebration of the abundance of things is too infectious. JJ Charlesworth, Mon Sep 10