Grow or Die is something you stumble upon, like a pottery shard you find when digging in your backyard. Installed in 2002 in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden’s Cowles Conservatory, the work by Sarah Sze is an underground tableau made of an odd assortment of Q-tips, pencils, circuitry wire, and styrofoam. If you notice it, you’ll see a plexiglass window breaking the red pattern of bricks in the Conservatory’s floor; peering down, you’ll see a strange miniature world.
Sze’s newest piece, Corner Plot, adds a new dimension to this notion: instead of a flat window looking down into the ground, she’s constructed a brick corner jutting out of the cobblestones, as if a building has tipped and sunk, on the corner of 60th Street and Fifth Avenue, right near Central Park. A window in the building (which is an exact replica of the apartment hi-rise across the street) offers a puzzling view of the contents of a life: books, a large leaf from a plant, an iPod, a microscope. Like our piece, Corner Plot is about discovery–stumbling upon a surprising find and wondering what it all means.
New York magazine has a nice slideshow of the creation of the piece. Via Gothamist.
Interior view of Corner Plot in Sze’s studio
Details of Grow or Die in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden