Is that rock inside or outside? Wait, is it even a rock? If not, then what is it? As bizarre as these questions may seem, they are the exact ones Sarah Sze wanted people to ask themselves when visiting her Triple Point (Planetarium) exhibit in the United States Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Sze, whose work tends to distort the viewer's perception of reality, "transformed the U.S. Pavilion into a chain of immersive experiences through a series of interrelated installations."
Although the project was specifically designed to engage the Neoclassical Pavilion, part of it will be on display at the Bronx Museum of the Arts from July 3rd through August 24th of this year. For more on the artist and the exhibit, keep reading after the break.
According to Sze, the original exhibition was an exploration of "how we locate ourselves in a perpetually disorienting world." Adding, "Each of the rooms functions as an experimental site, in which objects attempt to become instruments or assemblages that seek to measure or model our location in time and space. The aspiration to build models that capture complexity — and the impossibility of that undertaking — underscores this body of work.”
In keeping with the theme of disorientation, the original exhibition extended beyond the U.S. Pavilion and into the surrounding environment. A few days before the 2013 Venice Biennale opened, Sze and her team placed fake, but convincingly real, rocks in unexpected locations around the city. The sculptures, which were fashioned out of printed pictures of rocks on Tyvek and an underlying aluminum structure, both confused and delighted passersby.
The Bronx Museum of the Arts' version of the exhibit will also cause visitors to question what they are seeing, addressing "our desire to quantify and understand the universe, while ascribing a fragile, personal system of order." The museum, one of the U.S. Pavilion's commissioning institutions, is excited to bring the international work back home. To preview the upcoming exhibit, watch the video below to see it on display at the 2013 Venice Biennale.
