Sarah Sze expresses her desire to have a tactile relationship with materials in a world saturated with digital imagery. In describing today’s visual culture, Sze says, “You don’t know the authorship of an image when it gets to you, you can manipulate it and you can send it—it’s a kind of images as debris.”

For her 2015 exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Sze amplified and countered this contemporary experience through her installation Second Studio. By arranging paint skins, torn paper images, and other materials such as wood, thread, and rocks, Sze explored our fragmented relationship to illusionistic images by focusing our attention on each object’s materiality. “We have so much illusion but we don’t have touch and we don’t have taste and we don’t have smell—we don’t have that intimacy with images.”