Sarah Sze at Harvard Tonight

When Bostonist first saw Sarah Sze's work a couple years ago, we thought a benevolent fungus or a swarm of very resourceful insects had made their home in the Museum of Fine Arts lobby. The sculptures couldn't have been mounted in place: we got the distinct impression that they lived inside the walls and had just now decided to creep out, sending tendrils into the museum to snare unwary found objects.

Tonight, Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts will be hosting an evening with Sarah Sze, who was born in Boston and is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute. She's recently installed some delicious eye candy in the Seattle Opera and her 2000 and 2003 pieces in the Whitney have been described as an achievement of "oxymoronically bravura fragility" and "a whimsical, meandering raid on a hardware store," respectively. What Bostonist has seen of it can hardly be the handiwork of a solitary human being: it grows out of installation spaces like stalactites, with an intricacy that's usually reserved for circulatory systems and beehives.

We're hoping Sze reveals the secrets of her construction process at tonight's free and open-to-the-public event, and we intend to ask the hard questions: where does she keep the trained hornets that she can
command at will? Is it ethical to hybridize plants and graphing calculators? How much does she pay her little green army of Doozers, whom she must have contracted after she saw them building crystalline bridges and towers from processed radishes on Fraggle Rock?

Post and photo contributed by C. Fernsebner. Photo is of Sze's MFA installation in 2004