Timekeeper
Sarah Sze ’87
Sarah Sze’s latest work, Timekeeper, is an experiential piece whose projections chase one another around the walls of the Foster Gallery at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum. Video footage that includes digital clocks, running cheetahs, splashing liquids, and buildings being demolished is projected from dozens of whirring devices situated on a structure created from an unexpected and inspired collection of objects and elements. Timekeeper addresses how we measure time, countering actual clocks with more capricious measures.
One reviewer writes, “Timekeeper blurs the line between organic and mechanical . . . It keeps a form of eccentric time that is entirely its own, remembering moments over and over again as time slips by. In this sense, Timekeeper has no relationship to the mechanical devices we use to mark the literal passing of time, but instead to the way we recall and replay our lives, in selected fragments that, strung together, account for the passage of years.”
Sarah’s installations—which combine sculpture, architecture, painting, film—transform and transcend exhibition spaces. Sarah earned a MacArthur Fellowship for her work in 2003, and in 2013 she was the United States representative to the Venice Biennale. This year she finishes a project for New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority at the 96th Street subway station.