Anna Smith: All right. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Nasher. First things first, make sure you turn off your cell phones because everybody’s going to hear your business if you take a call in here. I’m Curator of Education Anna Smith, and today it’s my pleasure to introduce artist Sarah Sze. You know, I wish just a few more people were excited about today’s program, but we’ll just make do with who we have here.

I know many of you in this room are familiar with Sze’s work, and I think it’s safe to say that all of us on staff are fans. But seeing how she’s responded to the Nasher with incredibly thoughtful and immersive works that are both figuratively and literally multilayered has been a true joy. I know I plan to return and return to these works over the run of the show, and I imagine many of you will want to as well, giving them space to unfold over time.

Among her many accomplishments, Sara Sze was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003 and a Radcliffe Fellowship in 2005. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, the Carnegie International, and in international biennials, including Berlin, Guangzhou, Liverpool, Lyon, and Venice. Sze’s works are held in numerous permanent art collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, The Fondation Cartier in Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate London. Permanent public works include pieces at LaGuardia Airport, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York, and the Seattle Opera House. In 2021, Sze unveiled a new permanent commission for the Storm King Art Center. And in 2023, a major solo exhibition of Sze’s latest work was shown at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Speaking with Sze today is Nasher chief curator Jed Morris. His long and productive tenure at the Nasher has recently brought us the stunning exhibitions, Mark di Suvero: Steel Like Paper and Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-century Modern Life. Each of which was accompanied by a gorgeous publication. I’ve had the privilege of hearing both our featured artist and our curators speak about this exhibition over the past few days, and I won’t deprive the rest of you of that pleasure any longer.

Please join me now in welcoming Jed Morse and Sarah Sze.

Jed Morse: Thanks so much, Anna. Sarah, it’s such a pleasure to be sitting up here with you. For me, it’s — well, for us I’d say it’s been a long time coming. We had a pandemic that landed between the time that we started talking about this and the time that it happened. So with that factored in, it’s been about seven years in the making, and a lot’s happened in the intervening seven years, not just in the world, but in your work as well.

But I don’t want to review the past seven years of your work. And actually, Aaron, if you don’t mind starting the PowerPoint. So, for the audience, just so you know, this is going to scroll leisurely through a number of works and it’s starting with an exhibition that Sarah had at the Guggenheim Museum in New York about six months ago.

Your work is iterative in that you find as you’re doing one project, you find new elements that you want to explore more in the next project. And so one builds upon the next, upon the next, upon the next. Just over the past six months, you’ve done this incredible show at the Guggenheim. You’ve done an amazing installation for Artangel at Peckham Rye Station in London that has traveled to OGR in Turin, and you’ve also done another installation at the third Thailand Biennale, which opened in November... December... something like that. And as you see these slides roll by, you’ll start to recognize certain themes, certain elements that Sarah has drawn out or amplified in the current exhibition here at the Nasher. So, I wonder if you can talk about what the past six months of very intense work has been like for you, and how did it bring you to what you wanted to do here at the Sculpture Center?

Sarah Sze: Thank you. I just want to really quickly say it’s been a complete pleasure to work in Dallas. I feel like the art community in Dallas is really serious and dedicated and warm. I want to have a personal thank you to Nancy and David Nasher, who have brought me in like family and first knew my work, but then immediately, you know, love art and also I think love artists and love creating community around art and artists.

So that’s been really special, getting to know them and getting to know their family. Jeremy, Jed — the Nasher is a really unique place, and it’s been... that’s part of what was really made this work, I think in the end, almost like a garden and almost like an extension of many universes within one building. And that’s something that comes really from the kind of soul of this place as a place to experience what it is to be human through art.

So thank you all. Thank my team, who is incredible, who came here from New York to work with me. And I have three amazing galleries who I also consider like family and friends. Many of them traveled from those galleries — from London, from L.A., from New York. So thank you so much. And particular to Jill Feldman, who really heralded the... that just sort of is always the person who said, “we’re going to make this possible, and I believe in trust in the work.” So that trust is really important.

And maybe I’ll just jump on. Jed and I are really doing this improvisationally. But I just — the idea of trust, I think, is really interesting. And starting with the Guggenheim, I’ll say... and also there’s some slides from the Biennial here which I think we talked about.

We had talked about how there are threads from when I represented the United States in 2013, probably around when we first started talking doing this show. Even from then, there are threads into the show. But one of the things I love about... In this building there feels like a lot of trust, and I don’t use barriers in my work. And in the Guggenheim, that was a huge deal for safety reasons because Frank Lloyd Wright built that building to make barriers actually physically part of the building. You know, they have bibs, they have web walls. Everything was made so that already sculptures had places to go. And I did not allow there to be anything there. I asked that as an experiment because I think every... every exhibition and this one too, is an experiment.

So it’s really interesting for me, particularly in the piece upstairs that’s called Slow Dance, which has this kind of wave. I didn’t know how people would move through it. It’s always an experiment, but to me it’s interesting not to have barriers because I think if you give the audience the trust not to not to touch or to slow down, the audience actually accepts that trust.

And it’s kind of an amazing thing how, you know, in the Biennial, nothing — five thousand visitors and nothing was broken. In the Guggenheim, no accident reports. More accident reports in Gego, where there was... they were all over there. So I’m really interested in the trust that happens between a viewer and an artist through an inanimate object and to talk about really what Jed was saying about this kind of... kind of real jump in the work, I would say, from the Guggenheim.

A couple things happened. It was funny. When I did the Biennial, I felt like — when I was doing the American Pavilion for the Biennial, it was really kind of right before social media exploded. It was in 2013. I felt like I should do a body of work that I was known for. That I’d made a body of work, and that’s what I had gotten the biennial for.

But when that was done, I felt this incredible sense of freedom, like I could do anything I wanted, and things that I had been doing, like painting, but not showing it. A lot of video, but not showing it. I just started to put it out in the world. And so if you look sort of post-2013, I started mixing all of these things together and everything that I sort of, you know, artists can keep things in their studio, and different artists decide how much they let out.

So there’ll be artists who, like, everything from their studio, you see. And there’s other artists that are very, you know, they really edit. And I just stopped editing. I put everything out there and when I finally... when I finally did the show, it was really interesting to do a show in a place that said, “I am a sculpture center,” for me to say, “well, what is sculpture?”;

What has sculpture become, and what is an object? What is physicality in an age where in my own lifetime the physical object seems to be disappearing, seems to be confused, seems to be amalgamated with the nonphysical world? On the other hand, I make the argument — that I think is really important — is that everything outside our eyes is the physical world, and we talk about the analog and the digital as being different.

But the digital is a physical thing, and that’s something in this show you’ll see. So in, let’s say in Slow Dance, when there’s an edit between one image or another, you’ll see it pixelate. You’ll see the edit die. You’ll see... you’ll be reminded that everything there is material, that it’s paper that it’s string, that it’s pixels, you know, the way the image is formed itself.

And it oscillates between each image being an image and then your eye having to take all of these pixels and put together an image. So just playing on this idea of how the material and the digital are confused all the time, you know, things like, we know this, it happened in post-COVID — which our show got delayed through all of that — it became accelerated. You know, my parents never would have ordered food online. Now we all can order food online. You know, we have a percentage of the people we know we met first digitally, and then you see them in person and you’re like, you’re not supposed to be that tall. But, you know, my students at Columbia, they’ll say, you know, I wanted this red material... It was... it’s not the right red because I when I ordered online, it was this and no, no, but that’s actually the color. It is. It’s not... that’s not the wrong red. So I think it’s really interesting and it’s actually one of the questions I ask younger students is — ask them — “what’s a time in your life where the digital and the physical were confused? “And actually, the younger you get, the more complex it is.

You know, a fourth grade student who takes their train to school from Brooklyn to Manhattan said that when he’s reading his physical book, when they go underwater, he thinks the book is going to disappear because he’s going to lose signal on a physical object. So it’s, you know, it’s... it’s completely turned on its head.

[Laughter]

So there’s a lot of that in this show, I think, where you think you’re seeing something digital and it’s physical. You think they’re seeing something physical, digital, and it’s not. You know, another example, is in when you walk into the Nasher, I really wanted there to be, you know, this... there’s this incredible thrust to the garden, and that’s what’s so beautiful. I mean, the whole building is like is portals to a garden, really, in many ways. And so I wanted the sculpture to mimic sculptural things that dealt with the framing of landscape.

So, you know, screens or curtains, shades, but also this kind of mirage of the real... the real and the photograph. And this instinct immediately to — the minute you see something beautiful like that, of like, to take that picture. So if you look at that, it’s actually a deconstructed painting. And in some... sometimes that’s great to say, to like take sort of the most basic questions, which when I started making paintings, everyone would say, “how do you make these paintings? “Because they had collage, they had sculpture, they had oil paint, they had...

JM: Very physical.

SS: They’re very physical. And so that is actually how the paintings are made. They’re layered. So that’s a deconstruction of a painting. But the last thing I’ll say is that — on that — is this, this confusion. So I asked Jed to send a couple pictures of that view because I wanted to... I knew that that’s where I wanted you to be pulled, that... You know, a lot of time in the Nasher, you have a sculpture up closer.

So you come in and it’s like: sculpture. But I wanted you to be confused about, “what am I... what am I seeing? “And as you got closer — certain things like the horizon line you can only read from far away — But as you get closer, that disappears and details come up. And then, if you get really close, you realize that the middle layer of the three layers actually is a photograph of the view out to the Nasher garden.

And it’s just... it’s just the photograph that Jed sent me because I said I need a photograph. He didn’t know it was going to become part of the artwork. And part of that was I just wanted it to be, you know, crummy, not know what it was for, reused, poorly digitized, poorly framed, you know.

JM: Exactly.

[Laughter]

SS: You know, but this idea that images are debris that we’re getting them high low... We’re all photographers is this idea of, like, is it... do we really like seeing better, like, higher pixelization on our televisions? I don’t. I hate it when you see, like, Taxi Driver and it’s, like, digitized, you know, so this idea of mixing those all... And you see that in all three pieces. You’ll see very high digital images with very low. You’ll see ones that I’ve taken, you’ll see one that Jed’s taken, you’ll see ones that are bought.

So I love this strange idea that images are traded like objects. If I want a picture of a volcano, I can buy one, and I can go on and I can buy 20, and they’re being substituted for objects.

JM: Yeah. One of the things that I’ve noticed is just watching the kind of shift in your work just from the Guggenheim show to the one here at the Nasher is, there seems to be, I mean... Matter — physical objects have been a linchpin of your practice from, you know, the end of graduate school. I mean, the very beginning. All throughout your career.

And in fact, I think your, you know, your kind of iconic work by Sara Sze... And if we think of, like, what you did in in the Biennale in 2013 as kind of, you know, the close of that chapter, of these aggregations of objects where, you know, the sum is, you know, is greater than the parts.

That, I think, is something that has followed. But you’ve added all of these other elements in terms of painting and video and installation just from the Guggenheim show earlier this year to now, you’ve seen, I think, a real kind of distillation of form, where the physicality of the things that you use has, you know, has been kind of distilled to just the essential. Like, you know, you’re not using a lot of objects to kind of have a sense of agglomeration or proliferation or, you know, a lot of things, right?

You’re using just the amount of objects you need in order to communicate what you’re doing. So there’s this kind of distillation of form, but expansion of ideas. And if you look at the — particularly Slow Dance, which you see an image of right now — I mean, that installation, it’s, I think, the largest video array you’ve done to date, something like that. 722 individually hand-torn pieces of paper, all with projections on them, and then more projections on the floor.

But the only physical part of it are strings and paper. And then the tiny little things that define the line of the strings on the floor, and that’s it. And so I love that kind of distillation of matter. Could you talk a little bit about it?

 

What’s the first thing you come into? How do entryway writers think about it as the first sentence in the book? What’s the last sentence of the book? How does a character evolve over time? So I’m thinking that way when I’m thinking of a show. You know, when you go upstairs, do you return to Slow Dance and think of it differently because you’ve seen Love Song downstairs? Or when you go to the garden and you see Cave Painting from behind and you entirely forgot that you would see it through glass?

So there are all of these sorts of overt times and spaces of the museum itself. It’s almost performative. It’s live. You have these live experiences in the space. And so sometimes people would say, I would always ask, how many people, when I was doing objects, I’d say, how many objects are there? And every review would be “toothpicks and toilet paper,” and there would be a list.

And that to me was really interesting because I think it was, you know, the visual. And I think all of you, because you’re here, you have, you know, Clive Bell talked about how half the talent or more is in the viewer. All of you, because you’re here, obviously find a deep pleasure and connection with other human beings across ages through an artwork.

And when we have that moment, it’s addictive. You have this feeling of what it is to be human over the ages that you want more. And that’s why museums and why I think, you know, through the digital age, people will only want to have these experiences more in real time, in real space, with real objects, actually, even though they’re disappearing.

But I was interested. I always thought it is so funny because language is so impoverished that we have to name these things. But when you name them, they mean nothing. It doesn’t describe an installation. It’s really their relationship to each other, their relationship to architecture, their relationship to your personal history, to art history.

There are ones that are all one subject matter that are in black and white. And then there’s one thing that’s called Things Caused to Happen. And in the Guggenheim, it’ll come up. I think we’ll just let it run. But in the Guggenheim, there’s a piece that’s round, and it was called Things Caused to Happen.

And it was the first time where I took a series of images, and each image is totally different, but it’s constantly on at the Guggenheim. And here it comes up, and you sort of, I think, find an image, and you kind of also know that you’re finding an image that someone else isn’t. There’s also that lack of hierarchy in terms of telling you, “This is important. This is what you’re supposed to look at.”

It’s a sense of wandering, which is actually something I think I learned when I lived in Japan, which was with Japanese gardens. This idea of they’re completely—the narrative is one of discovery. It’s not like Versailles, where you’re like, “This is where I’m going to get the best view.” It’s where you have these little moments of discovery and this idea of wandering.

So in each of them, you have the sense of the things caused to happen, that you’re wandering. And you see it come back, and you say, “Oh, I can go back to the sun, but I just saw there’s a fox running across.” So each time you kind of gather, and so you become a collector of images yourself, an active collector of images.

JM: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting that you’ve incorporated imagery and particularly photographs and moving imagery within your body of work, because even the digital is something—it has a physical presence and exists in our space. All of these little things that everyone loves to kind of name as they’re writing reviews of the show, all the things that kind of make up the work of art, which are all things that we don’t pay any attention to in our everyday lives.

I mean, it’s tape, it’s string, it’s paper. I mean, you pull in everything that you’ve got around the studio, just little things. And oftentimes it’s things that were used to actually make the work of art that’s on view. And it’s amazing. I think one of the reasons why they like to list all of the stuff is that all of that insignificant stuff suddenly takes on a really kind of palpable meaning.

I mean, and that’s what sculpture is all about, making meaning of that kind of inert thing. And it’s fascinating that imagery has entered into that vocabulary. Again, it’s almost like there’s so much imagery that we’re exposed to nowadays that it just kind of washes through us. And it doesn’t have any—we don’t notice it. But it has an effect on us. Now, that’s the insignificant kind of commonplace material that you’re using to make meaning with.

SS: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that is important to me about the use of images is I’m interested actually—and I figured this out when I really was making paintings and thinking about images and paintings—as I’m interested in the percentage of images that’s inside our heads and that we are so conscious of what’s outside our heads.

You know, like sitting up here, I can remember, I’m having a flashback to 2016 when I gave a talk here, and then I’ll think about, “Oh, who, you know, where was I staying?” There are all these images happening in our heads. And, you know, different neuroscientists have different theories, and we may never know, but we could even propose that like 90% of the images in a 24-hour period, or 48-hour period, we’re dreaming, we’re imagining, we’re remembering, we’re hoping. All of those things are subconsciously happening all the time.

And the way we actually create meaning or memory over time is really interesting to me, whether it’s through a smell, through music, through an object. And so a lot of these images are actually, in my mind, harkening to the way you experience them as one of recognition, of remembering something, even though it’s not your memory. You have this sense of discovery.

So one of the goals always for me, no matter what medium, was that when you went into a museum, that space, let’s say here or a subway station, the actual active sense of seeing an artwork would be one of discovery, one of recognition, one of intimacy. I’m really interested in the idea of how does something become intimate? Because I think that’s very much what keeps us as human, is when we reach that point of intimacy and the value of intimacy.

And so that’s actually how I want the images to come. I don’t want them to be exterior images; I want them to be interior. And so actually, one of the most important things in the more recent work is sound.

And so the sound in this piece is actually just right because you actually don’t even realize it’s happening completely. It takes forever, and when it’s wrong, it’s awful. Like, it doesn’t work at all if it’s on the wrong volume. And also, it was interesting to me during COVID. I did do some installations in Paris, and I had to do it necessarily almost completely remotely. But then I got this special visa to go there, like I became an essential worker, and I went and installed the entire thing.

The one thing that was just completely wrong was the sound, because you couldn’t do the sound over video for digital, because sound is so sculptural, right? And so it’s just an interesting thing in these pieces because the note that the sound had to hit was almost this kind of hum, and the kind of hum like when you’re humming, you’re actually not realizing that you’re singing, and your brain is doing something else.

So it would sort of put you in a place where you’re not, where you’re—you know, I think many of us in our different professions, we have sometimes our best ideas when we least expect having them, right? Because we are distracted or we’re not... You can sit down in your studio or at your desk for an hour and be like, or write that paper.

And this one moment is when that one will happen. It’s like this one moment, you fall in love. You can’t make these things happen, right? And so I wanted the tone in the spaces to try to put you in a mindset where your senses are heightened because you’re being distracted somehow.

And I think the last thing I think that’s interesting is things like ASMR, these obsessions with cooking shows, with making things with craft, with seeing the physical in the digital. It’s kind of incredible—who knew that people would spend hours now or would want to go to bed to this? You know, it’s like that. So it’s the most basic physical things then being translated into the digital that can actually be really interesting.

But I will say the one thing I gave a talk to a much smaller group, but just by chance, they were here. And I also think that the digital as a medium—I’m really interested in what a painting can do that a sculpture can’t do. Like, those of you who—anyone who—I never lived with my work, but my husband was like, “We’re bringing work to our house, and we’re bringing that. I want that in my house.”

So it’s really, really interesting because, to me—and people have argued this—a painting will make more space. You can put a painting on that wall, and I can go 50 miles. But if you put a sculpture there, it’s in physical space. And I think that what the digital—and so painting can create this portal into your mind. With a sculpture, you can go up and be like, “I know what’s real. It’s not.”

JM: And it’s in your room and takes up room.

SS: And you can walk around it, you can break it, you can do things to it to find out what it is. But with the digital, I think that what it leaves us—actually, someone last night was saying that it gives you desire, but actually, I think it gives you longing. And I think longing is very real. It’s not necessarily a criticism, let’s say, of the digital; it’s part of the spectrum of human emotions. And someone like Dürer, you know, melancholia—these were their main subjects. Rembrandt, we could say. And that’s critical; it can be your medium to talk about sorrow. And it can be a very, very powerful medium because it’s part of our spectrum.

But I think the digital medium, its most powerful use, is to create longing. Because you always want the smell, you always want the taste, you always want the touch, you always want to know what’s to the left or the right. You never get the whole thing.

JM: Yeah, you know it’s interesting. I feel that in both Slow Dance upstairs and Love Song down here... Earlier, you were talking about the humming and how that’s something you do unconsciously as you’re thinking through other things in your mind. And you had talked about wanting that sense of interiority, particularly with Slow Dance upstairs. I think you just fall into the trance that it brings by the change of the images, the sounds that either align or don’t align with it, and the humming, which again puts you inside your head.

Talking about the images, it’s like the images that play inside your head. But this idea of longing, I also connected really strongly with Love Song downstairs. It was interesting; you said longing. I was thinking nostalgia, which has all kinds of historical meanings, but really because it also carries that sense of longing, usually for something that’s not present. So you’re talking about wanting to know what it smells like, what the sounds are like—it’s the part of the image that’s just outside of the frame.

JM: You know, but there’s also that sense of the way that it is representing nature, just like the garden is actually not nature, it’s representing nature because it’s artifice.

SS: Sure, right. It’s a parking lot.

JM: It’s a parking lot that we made into a garden, right? And it’s in the middle of the city. So how... you know, how... and it’s also very...

SS: I mean, it’s like, it’s an incredible haven.

JM: It is an incredible haven, but it’s a constructed one.

SS: Right.

JM: You know, and I think that’s one of the things that Love Song Downstairs does, is it kind of points out this sense of longing, longing to be in nature because you have all these incredible images of scenes from sometimes very recognizable places like Monument Valley, or those wonderful images of swirling flocks of birds, and the shadows of the tree, which just looks like the shadows of a tree. But the tree is made out of sculpture armature wire, and photographs of leaves, not actual leaves, not actual branches, the things that an artist uses to make a representation of nature. And it just made me think a lot about how the artifice of that sculpted tree mirrors, in a way, the artifice of the kind of constructed garden that we have. I don’t know, maybe that’s not a question.

SS: We only have words, we have images. So it’s interesting. I’m thinking as you’re talking. So nostalgia is a word I completely reject in my mind. But just because I always did, particularly with objects, is one of the things that I thought was interesting was how could you take something like this that has zero nostalgia values, zero like emotional value, and then put it in a context, and then in a sculpture where I felt sorrow and longing.

So if you take like a teddy bear that’s like eyeball is off of it, we all... Like, that was, I was completely, you know, anything that had been used by another human being I wanted... that was too easy you see. And so I’m thinking, so what I was thinking about is, am I you know, I’m challenging myself in it.

So because I think there’s a nostalgia there, I still make a little bit cringe at that, at that word. But I think in my work, but I think there’s... I’m interested in saying something like the medium of film or video or photography and showing it in a way where like, you know, the texture of it can be so beautiful in different forms.

And of course there’s this nostalgia now, like, you know, 13-year-olds are trying to get like the little like, you know, everyone wants like the Canon camera that we had not so long ago. I had one to carry around in their pocket, like, that’s the big... And those pictures are like, they look totally different than what you get on an iPhone and we want that. But that’s a form. That’s form. It’s like... it’s... I’m interested in the reminder that, you know, that’s like using a sable brush versus, you know, like an acrylic brush and using, you know, a little more Dammar varnish. And then with that photography and video is this like... incredibly... become this incredibly dexterous... like you can be dexterous within it, you can really play with it, and I think you know it’s changing so quickly but you know it’s just like with let’s say screens like more pixels is better. It’s not better. It’s just a different look because it’s all artifice, right?

JM: Yeah.

SS: So it’s like, do you want to use more, you know, turpentine and make it washy? It’s not... there’s this sort of... was this kind of strange thing, like it was better with more digital, and actually, things looked awful, right? And people would look... so, I mean, but it wasn’t that it looked awful, it looked dated, right? So photography looks dated, but there’s something like... so, for example, I was thinking, is it nostalgic? I was thinking like, am I...

JM: I guess, nostalgia because it involves memory, right?

SS: And involves memory, involves memory, but sure. But I was thinking like in terms of whether it involves memory, but what I want to do with my viewer is I want the viewer to make that move, not me. I don’t want to tell you this is nostalgic. I want you to go to it and say, “oh my God, that totally reminds me of when like my first lover left me on that train. “But like, how did... but no one else, is anyone else going to have that feeling? I don’t want to tell them that that’s what this is about, let’s say, but so the nostalgia, nostalgia comes from your own memories, right? So I want you to elicit what a memory looks like in your head and how we’re forming them, but I don’t want to give you a memory. I want you to find your own in it. But then I was thinking, so I was challenging myself as I was doing it. I was like, dreaming. I need to take notes when people are in it, because I’m like, oh, I have 17 ideas to respond to. But one thing that was sort of interesting and that’s an object that could be argued as nostalgic is in the piece downstairs, in Love Song, it was really important to break up that tree, because I didn’t want it to be the rep-- You also use this word, which I was also cringing about, like I was representing a tree. Because to me, it is a tree, but it’s also a projector, it’s also a shadow maker, it’s also a photograph, it’s also a sculpture.

So this idea, it’s also a painting, but it was really important to break up the tree by putting in one more, what I saw as like a portable found object that was made to be like a portable studio, whether it was a camera tripod.... Everything that hits the floor is a tripod. So it’s this idea to me of a sculpture that you set up somewhere and your studio is portable. And this idea of bringing a sculpture anywhere it goes, it makes... it becomes site-specific, is really interesting to me. Like a kiosk. I was always really interested in Russian kiosks. It’s a portable system of the spread of information or ideas. So that’s very important to me, that the objects in there are all—you can fold them up, you can put them in your bag.

So there’s the plein air painting setup. But instead of a painting where the painting would be, you have a projection. And on... that projection is on a postcard, and to that you could argue, the postcard as an object is, if I were debating myself, I could say that was a nostalgic decision, but to me it was very important that it wasn’t like a postcard from my mother when I was at camp. It was like it’s an off-the-shelf postcard, and if you want to spend time, you can actually look, there are a bunch of postcards and they’re all postcards from the Hubble telescope and like the one that’s being projected on is which I thought of as which I considered as a title for the piece is “Winter Approaching Saturn” and then you see that so you have that then you have the postcard and you have the trade of images like the trade of images through the postcard and this idea of you know how you shared like what it was like to be to have gone to the Taj Mahal, like I’d send you a postcard, but then it all layering back into now it’s actually this video from my iPhone from the Taj Mahal instead of the postcard itself.

JM: Right? Right. Yeah.

SS: Snail mail. [laughing]

JM: And the inclusion of the plein air painting easel was another thing that just brought me straight to artifice, because you had these artists who were going out into nature and they were painting paintings quickly, then they were taking them back to their studio and they were repainting them as kind of idealized visions.

SS: But is that always true? I don’t think that’s always true.

JM: Not necessarily. In, like, 19th-century American landscape painting, it was invariably, you know, unless it’s like a little sketch that they did, they’re always making decisions that are artistic decisions and not like, “I’m trying to capture what I’m seeing visually.” They’re always making decisions about composition and not just like where they set up their canvas and the view that they’re seeing. They’re constructing it.

SS: But in some ways, I would argue the opposite. I would say it’s like the least artifice in the idea that plein air painting was about “I’m painting in the air painting in the environment. We talked about it, and there are these famous stories that I think are true, like Whistler actually strapped himself to a mast in a storm and, like, couldn’t move. It’s the great artist sacrificing their life for their art story, because he said, “I want to understand. I don’t want to paint the storm; I want to paint what it is to be in the storm.” Right? And, I mean, I actually don’t think Van Gogh was going back and saying, “I need a petal there.” When I went to Provence, I was like, “wow, these are the real colors, like, I thought they were making this up, but that light is that light.” You know, and so to me, I think Monet wasn’t going back to Chartres and being like, “I think I’ll make this one purple.” I think he was like, “That’s what this light looks like.” Because when you have sunset the sunset and it hits, you know, the Nasher at 5 o’clock, it’s actually alizarin crimson, and that’s amazing, right?

So to me, one thing that art can do is remind you how spectacular reality is. So that was one of the things about, like, stopping you before you went to the allée was like delaying that gratification of being like.... Even if you’ve been here before, like, “I’m going to rush out, ”but it would emphasize that when you turn, that allée then became this incredible rush, because. That painting and all of those works play with perspective in different ways. They play with the two most traditional ways to play with perspective, I’ll propose, are, you know, one point perspective, you know when you’re trying to do depth on a single plane...

JM: ... and gridding it out orthogonally.

SS: Or trying to create a flat object giving you dimensional space, right? So there’s Renaissance space, and then there’s isometric, something that was used much more in Asia and really well developed in Japan. They were closed for years, and no one had seen these images, it opens, the Impressionists see these images that were the development of perspective in an entirely different way. So advanced, which stole immediately. Which I played with in that room, which was like, that Van Gogh stole all these things from Hiroshige and Hokusai, of like putting a branch right here and seeing, like, that elevator. And that’s what the branch... There’s this moment hopefully where you feel you’re in the environment because the branch... you imagine your eyes trying to see through the bushes to these long landscapes. And so that changes and is really interesting.

One thing I read that I think is interesting is that we are seeing, actually, the younger generation is seeing much more and learning to draw and learning to depict things much more in isometric because with things like video games or if you want to go see the show at the Met and get a three-dimensional walkway, the computer can’t use one point perspective because if you turn a corner when you’re using one point perspective, it doesn’t work. Isometric allows you to turn a corner and see things, so we’ve actually gone back in this age to using that as a tool that our brains are starting to... you know, the more we see it, the more we learn how to see things that way.

JM: Right? Yeah, I mean, thinking about space and the depiction of space, and particularly the Cave Painting upstairs in front of the garden, one of the things that struck me was how it mirrors the architecture. Renzo used to talk about the Nasher Sculpture Center kind of being a series of veils or a series of planes—you know, there’s the plane of the city, then there’s the plane of the galleries, and then there’s the plane of the garden, so you have this kind of series of frames, essentially, and you see through all of them. And that’s what that piece is doing, in a sense, but it’s confusing it because you’ve got, in the middle of it, the view of the garden, and then after you pass it, the view of the garden.

I want to talk a little bit about architecture just because you’ve worked in so many incredible spaces. I mean, you know, from modernist masterpieces like the Guggenheim to, you know, incredibly evocative and historically, you know, compromised buildings like the Haus der Kunst in Munich, to abandoned waiting rooms in train stations, and so... and also, you were trained as an architect and your father is an architect, and so you’ve been thinking about space and architecture for a long time, and I’m just curious, you know, how do you approach a new space when you’re given an opportunity like this?

SS: Yeah, I mean, I talked a little bit about how I wanted to think about things that sculpture did and play around with what is like... pull sculpture to its edge because this was a sculpture center. So to have it be, you know, like gravity, weight, sculpture in the round, circulation, things that like, are actually like more than the, the meat and potatoes, the main language of sculpture than of, let’s say a painting you’d normally... And so that idea that you would have a place that really was examining sculpture to me was interesting. I mean, I think this building is incredible on so many levels. I think it’s... I said this to you, but, you know, I’ve been here many, many times and it’s interesting to see anything—an artwork a piece of music, a building—age. And this building, it looks brand new, contemporary, alive, as alive as I think the day (I wasn’t here, the day it was built) but it feels like that it has this kind of epic classic new use of language was obviously it was using, you know, this idea of a kind of Roman ruin, which I think is interesting. I don’t know if you talked about it, but I think it’s interesting that he... it I think it comes from the Philip Johnson Glass house who he talked about how he looked at buildings that were destroyed after wars. And they would always be the chimney.

JM: Right.

SS: And so the glass house just has the chimney. So you have the bearing wall structure and then you have this pavilion around it. And so the glass house was just that. It was it was the fire. Right. Right. I mean, what’s interesting about this building is it’s the idea of the Roman ruin. And like all of America is all of these bearing wall structures, pretty much all of them, unless you go to like the northeast coast, I think... I’m going to propose that that, thinking if that’s true in Dallas, they probably have them. But anything that’s built, like since the invention of steel isn’t bearing walls. So these are not like bricks on bricks. These are brick face, right?

JM: Yeah.

SS: So, so this whole idea of the the... again, it’s almost pictorial. It’s the... it’s the imagination of gravity. And it’s also the the presence of the idea of gravitas that these buildings, like these walls are heavy, their weight, they’re actually not like you’re going to peel them off in there. But it was so the whole building is a kind of artifice sculpture of these like Roman ruins. And same with LA. I mean, it’s amazing. You go out and you’re like, “my God, I’m in France,” right? So, but, but it was but, but it’s off center. So, you know, this idea that these are the heavy buildings, the things that have lasted forever, they are not.

JM: Kind of patina of age.

SS: But he plays with that, it’s playful. I mean, Renzo is always playful. And he deals with lightness in this incredible way. So to have these ceilings that allude to the sky was incredibly effective, and the garden is as important as the building, right? And that’s such an amazing... I mean, as I said, I think the building is a portal to the garden. The Arps with the garden behind them are like nothing you’ve ever seen. It’s like a breath to go through, and they suddenly look so light, right? It takes all of the gravity out of them. So, I mean, every building for me is a conversation. Usually, it’s a marriage I’m not really interested in fighting a building. I’m usually interested in looking at a building and saying, here’s what its successes are in my mind, and here are maybe what its failures are, and actually focusing on its successes. And it’s a weird thing because I would not have probably darkened the upstairs room, but I also like to sort of work with what’s given, and at a certain point, Jed was like, you know, the show’s going to be darkened, and I said this a long time ago, you give me time, you give me a location, you give me a budget, you’ll get a piece. And if we were going to take down—because the show before had darkened that room—if we were going to take that down, that would take four days off of our installation. So that’s also just a really practical thing. It was like, well, if we keep the walls, and I’ll make that part of the piece, and it’s just like, even there’s something in me that’s tearing the walls down and throwing them out that we do in the art world all the time. I was like, okay, so interesting. This is a new challenge, because I always thought this would be, you’d go down, it would be this underground, it’d be like a terrarium. I loved that you would see, like you would anticipate this world that you get to by using the glass as a screen before you come in and then you’d be completely immersed down here. It’s like the architecture is perfect for that. And when I did my lecture here, I was like, “I know I’m going to do that space sometime.” But I didn’t anticipate doing another video upstairs. But when it was closed, I thought this could actually be really interesting and really surprising because it’s not maybe, I don’t know if you don’t usually do video up there, and so it’d be a surprising way, and I thought it would be interesting to go through light to dark to light when you go through those three and have each of those are like an incredible reveal, you know, going from the entryway to, you know, to Slow Dance and then to Arp is also like a really, I always think about like the other shows as part of the experience for the viewer.

JM: Kind of the memory of the space. Yeah.

SS: And then that is the biggest, I would say experiment for me, that it’s really interesting. And I’m actually really interested in seeing how people move through it. I think every installation, it’s an experiment, because they don’t know what the audience is going to do. My favorite thing about the Guggenheim show is that, apparently, for circulation, they had to time how long anyone stays on a bay so that they know how many people to let in. And because that’s actually a tourist attraction in and of itself, it has a huge population that don’t even care what artist is there, they’re just coming in and like it’s amazing because their languages from all over the world. And I actually love that. I love public artworks because people are like, “Is that art?” They don’t know. I love having that audience, but they have to be very careful about timing of the audience. So apparently for the ring where the show was, they had to triple the time that people stayed on the bay. And so that was kind of like the best compliment, that people slowed and that they stayed. And that was an experiment, and it was an experiment not to have barriers. And so I think that piece is like the basic experiment for me because I didn’t even know where you would, in making it, where you would want to stand. I was really interested in making a place where there wasn’t an object, there isn’t a clear, there is a center, but it’s not clear that that’s the best view. And in some ways, I think something I didn’t know would happen is that I think probably the best way to view that piece is in movement, to go behind it, to go around it, to see it fall apart from different angles, but it’s maybe from the walls. So it’s almost like an arena. It’s almost like going to see a tennis game or going to watch a happening. And you’re actually experiencing it, but you’re experiencing it as an audience. And experiencing a great performance as an audience, it’s not that you’re on the outside of it. Like being a spectator is an incredible performative experience.

JM: Yeah, you’re there. You’re present.

SS: Yeah, so I think that’s, for me, really interesting. I don’t know, I don’t know, because I need to see more people in it, but that’s a really interesting idea about that piece and the way it dissolves and grows as a reflection to the Center, and that happens totally different, and you kind of know by chance, like that’s by chance. Like I didn’t know what it would do on the floor, really. I mean, I could guess, but we didn’t, you know, we were modeling the video on a screen as big as that, you know.

JM: Sure.

SS: So that’s a very exciting piece for me because I think it’s, I’ve never seen anything like it, and that’s always the best kind of piece you can make as an artist when you’re like, I had no idea that’s what would happen.

JM: And that’s, yeah, it’s amazing how those two sides kind of mirror each other. There’s a relationship in that the images either completely mirror each other or they travel from one side to the other. There’s this kind of conversation between the two of them. And then there’s the inverse, because the shadows that are cast through the paper on the back sides of them, it’s kind of like the thing that’s happening and then, you know, the kind of memory of that thing, yeah, on the other side.

SS: Yeah, on the walls. Yeah, of the walls, which in most museums are like, you know, that was who was in it because someone said that was sculptures, something that you bump into when you’re looking at a painting.

JM: Yeah. I think it’s often attributed to Ad Reinhart.

SS: Oh, is it Ad Reinhardt? Okay, but I love that. The walls are actually kind of the remnant, it’s actually quite like it could be the projection, but it’s really just the leftover. But I just, I was thinking, as you were talking, I also want to thank you and Jeremy just for being there, for my experience for being here was very much like you could bring the studio here and that there was no expectation that, you know, as an artist, you could really try anything you wanted and do anything you wanted. And that’s not always the case because there can be a real fear of failure or the protection of, like, knowing, oh, this is, you know, you, you, I mean, you probably have, like, the favorite piece that you like of mine. And there was never, like, we want this kind of work. And so, for me, what’s really fun about this show is that they’re all new, they’re all fresh, they all changed dramatically. The piece down here, we tripled it in size on site, like the plein air video wasn’t in it. And there was just, I was given a lot of freedom as an artist to try things and I hope that that actually is, I do think that the experience the artist is given, I hope, and I think it can happen, is actually given to the audience.

JM: So that brings us back to trust, which brings us full circle to the beginning of the conversation. Maybe this is a good point where we can open it up to questions from the audience. Anyone who wants to ask a question?

Audience Member: [Unintelligible] ...shadows. Thanks. Did you... could you hear at the beginning of the question or do you need to repeat...?

JM: Why don’t you go ahead and repeat it? That way everyone should hear.

Audience Member: Sure. Yeah. So I am just curious how much in your mind you’re thinking of the space when it is full of viewers, like it’s been, you know, for opening in particular. You see shadows of people’s profiles in the projections, and you’re talking about where to stand upstairs. When there are people all in the room, that sort of affects where people are going. And it, to me, felt very much like the viewers are elements of the sculpture. Do you think about in those spaces of the viewers being a layer of the sculpture itself?

SS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’m absolutely thinking about that. And I think that’s one of the things that’s really interesting about Slow Dance is that it’s confusing to know because it’s changing all the time. When you feel like you’re in the middle of it, suddenly you’re not. And then you’re being lit by the side, or you’re being, it’s disappearing, that noise that’s actually cards going. So when you hear that, you feel it over your body. Like last night, a whole bunch of people showed me pictures they’d taken of themselves in it, and they were amazing. Things that I didn’t know would happen. And I think it also gets you to move because you want to see how people are moving. I actually don’t do Instagram, but I have an account, and I use it to hash... This sounds really crazy, but I don’t know why everyone doesn’t like do this. There’s like you can hashtag a thing, and then you can search it. So if you hashtag, I’ll hashtag my name, and then I’ll see what other people saw the work. And that’s like an incredible thing. And so like one thing that happened in the Guggenheim was where you could get a shadow. All these people did these beautiful self-portraits of themselves in shadow. In Thailand, it worked much more almost like a Kusama mirror box. And people were like, everyone went in and got a selfie. It was just the different shape of the room. And here, there’s these incredible moments where you become part of the piece. There was one part in the time that did that. And you could get an amazing photograph. But here, I think it’s actually—I hope that people—it’s kind of a strange, almost like a Felix Gonzalez-Torres dissemination into the world idea that I hope that people use it not just like a selfie. Some of the videos are from India. We came up from India. And there’s actually like selfie stands of Modi all over India, not like a selfie stand, but this kind of idea of reimagining and remaking your own work within the piece and then actually disseminating that in the world. And so for me, it’s really fascinating because I’m actually going in and looking and seeing how other people are using the work as a tool to become an image maker because I think in some ways, I actually at this moment in the middle of the Guggenheim where I was like, what am I doing? This is like, it was like, there’s a lot going on. And I was like, well, what is the thing I’m doing? And I realized, oh, each of the bays is an image-making system. And the sculpture is making the image, the image is making the sculpture. Everything is interdependent. They’re actually making each other. So when the viewer comes in, it completes the work, right? I mean, many artists talk that way. But what’s interesting about these pieces is they actually, because we all have phones, people start making their own images and they become image makers within this image making system. So I love that.

JM: Other questions. Yeah, there’s a microphone coming.

Audience Member: Hello. You’ve sort of answered this a bit with the perspective and your system, but I’m interested in the overall form of each one. Like, I see these things repeating like orbs and the hammock kind of strings that go down, and then sort of like helices. I was wondering if there’s anything you want us to know about the overall shape and form that your work takes?

SS: It’s a great question, and I mean, it’s such a sculptural question. So the hammock, which actually is very much related to Slow Dance in these pieces, they’re catenaries, so they’re being made by gravity. If you just take a string and hold it from here to here, it does the most beautiful thing in real space. Pendulums are the oldest way, you know, from ceiling to floor, these really old sculptural things that perform incredible feats by almost doing nothing.

The slope is actually extremely complex because I wanted it to be, and it did things that I didn’t even imagine. When you photograph it, it sometimes almost looks convex, weirdly. I was thinking partially about how in many photo studios, they want to get rid of the architecture and avoid edges. So you have a sloped wall and what that would do to your sense of architecture, how to kind of diminish the solidity of the walls. But once you, as you can imagine, put a slope of strings of the same length, once you put one piece of paper on it, that goes down. So the whole thing is very carefully balanced, and it’s almost like a game because I wanted to achieve a shape that felt organic, that didn’t feel computer-made but was crafted through the actual weight and need.

It’s super sculptural in the sculptural space. You couldn’t do the math; if you did a mathematical equation, it would be insane. But actually, not to single her out, Nancy made a really nice comment when she came in early, asking me about that shape when no one else did. I really needed a shape because I didn’t want it to be a screen. Everything about that space makes you think it’s a screen and you’re interpreting it, but it’s not. The pieces of paper, the strings, they’re not straight, there are two of them. And then it is a screen because we’re reading this screen. But she made a nice comment because she said it related to the Arp because Arp also deals with forms that allude to nature, but they’re never fully figurative or natural. That’s what I meant about the half of it being in the viewer. We’re making them figurative; they’re not fully giving us all of that. It’s a collaborative effort to arrive at the figurative conclusion. So that was a beautiful relationship between the two things there.

JM: Yeah. Anna, you’ve got a question back there.

Audience Member: Thanks. Something I’ve always been interested in, in terms of your work, is the element of time. And just wondering if you could kind of elaborate-- excuse me-- on the multifaceted nature of time within your work: the time of the actual pieces themselves, the time that you spend making the thing, the time that the viewers have with it, and then just kind of its time in the spaces that they occupy.

SS: So, that’s super important to me and something I think about all the time. Someone asked me about the objects on the bottom of Cave Painting — so those are they’re actually operative. If we open the window or door, without them, everything would be flying around due to their weights. They’re remnants from my studio, so its this idea of bringing the time of making a work... Those of you who make work in this room, you know, there’s like this very intense time when you’re in your studio alone or with some other people, but you’re making work. You bring people into the studio, that changes it, but when you bring work into public, you install and then there’s this moment where you see people, you know, actually interact with the work, and these are really dramatic chapters in a creative experience. And so to collapse that so that you’re having the kind of intimacy of a studio visit, you know, one of the things I always say is , like, if you say, oh, you could go to, you know, an Agnes Martin show, or you could go to her studio, I’d be like “Studio. I’ll go to the studio.” Because that’s where you see this happen. That’s where you... it’s about intimacy and process, so to try and bring intimacy and process into the gallery is important. And than as Jed said, like we’d talked about the piece down here actually, we had... I had to make it an studio because it didn’t work like it worked in my studio, and then it just didn’t work in that space the way I thought it would.

The Cave Painting actually worked, like, to me was almost better than I thought it could be because I was sort of concerned, like, can it hold this space? It’s just... and we... when Cave Painting is like, I thought maybe it would be like seven layers, and after three I was like, no, three is interesting because it’s like you want to kind of barely be holding together. You want it to be right on the verge of like, a Grecian urn where you got seven pieces and you have to, like, figure out how to make, you know, this thing alive by having, you know, the filling. Or I’m always fascinated by when I go to, like the Met, and there’s all these sculptures without heads, and you totally accept that you’re in, you know, you actually expect it. That’s now become what we expect.

So it was an important thing in the process to say, “no, no more.” We like... We want that kind of long—again you want the longing for more. You want the audience to put together this piece in their eye, and that... it was like the perfect amount there. Someone also did these amazing pictures, which I recommend, where they stood on the other side and photographed someone photograph them, and they... you become a photograph in the piece, so that was something that I had never seen.

JM: As you were scrolling through Instagram?

SS: No, a friend of mine showed it to me. But it was amazing because your iPhone flattens it, and you look like you’re a collage. It was a good one. I didn’t know that would happen, but that was just one of many sort of thoughts... I mean, I said the time, I will say just one thing, the obvious piece of time in the... for me was that... the tree is not in my mind a complete representation of a tree, it’s actually supposed to be a timekeeper because if you spend time with it you see that it’s dead, it’s winter, spring, summer, fall, and it’s actually all of these times — supposed to be — in one moment. So again, it has to do with, like, the thing itself is a clock. And I said this, and it’s so fun, it’s just funny to me because it seems like I learned this about Dallas is that people here all said to me that you can have four seasons in a day, and I was like, “I didn’t know that, “but it’s sort of like the four seasons in a day that would be... that could have been a great title too. “Four Seasons in a Day.”

JM: You know, why don’t we go...

SS: No, it’s a great question. So first of all, we can’t always—the Guggenheim was an incredible challenge because those spaces are completely deceptive in size. Like one of those bays is about as wide as this room. And you think it’s, and then you have this oculus behind you. So your sense of space is totally different, right? Like the Nasher’s also weirdly, you think things are bigger or smaller in different places because of the windows, because of the length, because you enter the rooms through the center. That’s very unusual to have these, like, each room. And so each space had its challenges.

I could not build the Nasher or the Guggenheim in my space. But I would build parts of it so that I knew for certain, like for the Guggenheim, I did build a ramp and I painted on a ramp and the paint dripped on the ramp and then I realized, oh, this is interesting because the paint is acting sculpturally. So actually then photograph that painting and put it on the edge, we called it the Holbein in the studio because Holbein did these incredible, what do you call it? Optical illusions where you have to stand in one place. So, and that was something that was really important that I couldn’t do live because you have these, you have these limited windows because museums need to stay open. They can’t be closed, you know, to their audience that long. So it really depends on the institution.

So I didn’t think I needed to build a model for I’m doing a show in Venice at Victoria Miro Gallery. It’s a tiny room, and I thought, I know how to do this. And then there was a moment where I was like, no, I need—it’s so small that I actually need to understand. And I built it, and I realized what I’m putting in here is way too big because you can’t back up from it. But I built it out of foam core just to get the scale of the model in the space. When I did SF MoMA, like the Oculus, which I think was the first piece Jed saw in like 2000. I couldn’t build the Oculus, but I built like each place where I was going to put the five different pieces of sculpture So that when we got there, we knew how to attach it. So sometimes it’s just pieces. So it really depends on what that space needs. I don’t know if does that answer your question But I think the more we’ve prepared before, the better, the more opportunity there is to like then tear the piece apart and make, you know, change it on site.

JM: Phyllis, Did you have a question? Yeah.

Audience Member: Have you arrived to Terminal B at LaGuardia yourself as a traveler, and how do you feel when you’re going down the escalator?

SS: Many times, I think I did come here and then I’m going to go home. It’s great, but that was a really hard piece to do in the middle of COVID. It was actually just how quickly the world changes. Governor Cuomo’s office called me and said, “This is going to open. We’re opening an airport. You’re an essential worker. Get down there and put this thing up.” And I had a hazmat suit on. I remember driving there, and there was not a person in sight. I told my crew, “It’s up to you, you know, no one has to work on this project.” I totally get it, and everyone was like, “Okay, we’re not.” And I was like, “Cool.” I actually videotaped myself because I was like, “This is so weird. I’m the only person in the world.” And it was interesting. LaGuardia—it was very strange. LaGuardia had—it was full of homeless people who had figured out that you could just be there. I mean, it was the strain, and nobody, I don’t think, knew that. And we got it up, and we put it up.

With public art, to me, it was really important, and it just was always important to me to have a very diverse practice because I love things that you can do in a private gallery that are super ephemeral and they’re going to be protected or a museum that has a guard. And I love things that can garner an audience that doesn’t even know it’s art. But with the public ones, we really go all out. I’m really interested in trying to make public art challenging. Again, it’s trusting the audience. I think that people underestimate. I kind of think that education around art creates an intimidation around art that people think they need to know things. And I really am interested in people seeing art and not knowing it’s art. They don’t need—I like making art, and no one knows who made it. And so we worked really hard on making that something that didn’t look like anything anyone had seen. And that’s very hard to do because of all of the politics of anyone who works in the institution, anything that’s public. Things get watered down so quickly.

This happens in architecture all the time, but also something that people don’t think about too much, I think, is that with those kinds of pieces, you need to work with fabricators and engineers, and for them to put in bids for something they have no idea how to build is very hard because they don’t want to lose money.

So that piece is incredibly hard to build. And I worked with a fabricator who’s incredible and is a good friend. Adam Kamens, he runs a company named Amuneal, and he never, ever worries about losing money on a piece. And that’s very rare. And so that’s why we couldn’t—because I don’t think anything’s actually been physically built like that, because it’s a void. But it’s supposed to feel extremely light, right? But what I like about it is it’s actually a sculpture nesting a void. And all of the pictures in it are the pictures of the sky over New York over time. So the noon is in the middle. So it’s also a timekeeper. But structurally, to have it be that fragile, it’s actually in the bottom to have a very thin strip come down and cantilever out like that and not do this is very, very hard. So it’s woven like a very, very, you know, it’s like weaving a basket out of stainless steel and then polishing it all off and everything polished stainless steel. So, and that’s, you know, it’s much easier to make public art that we’ve seen before because it’s really hard to get fabricators to take the risks because they can’t afford to. So it’s really hard. So that’s a very special collaboration.

Yeah, and I really wanted you on the exit, so when you come down, see it that way. So I was really happy with that, that work that was part of, and that’s, that is the architectural training. So if you guys have been there, you’re like, you come and it’s the beginning, but when you depart, it’s really weird because you go through the exit and as you and you have this sense and I actually love an escalator for watching art. I love that about the old MoMA where you saw the garden and they were on the escalator because there’s something really interesting about it. It’s like being in a train way where, you know, don’t have to move, but you’re moving and watching it. So I loved the exit at LaGuardia.

JM: Sarah, thank you so much.

SS: That’s the exit.

JM: It’s... exactly. And thank you all for spending this afternoon with us. I encourage you to go back out into the galleries and experience these works of art again in person. Thank you.

SS: Thanks.