DENVER—July 2, 2025—The Denver Art Museum (DAM) proudly presents the U.S. debut of Sleepers (2024) by internationally recognized artist and 2003 MacArthur Fellow Sarah Sze. The DAM recently acquired Sleepers, which will be on view in the relaunched art series Fuse Box. The acquisition of this new media art installation is crucial for the DAM as it significantly enriches its contemporary collection, broadens its appeal to diverse audiences and reinforces its commitment to showcasing innovative artistic expressions that reflect the evolving landscape of art and technology.
In this six-channel video installation, moving images are projected onto over 300 hand-torn paper screens suspended from parallel lines of string. Sze’s visuals of landscapes, still lifes and portraits celebrate the mundane and the extraordinary, the personal and the universal, the eternal and the ephemeral, exploring our relationship with an ever-changing digital world. Fuse Box: Sarah Sze will be on view from July 13, 2025, through July 2026, on level four of the museum’s Hamilton Building.
Sarah Sze, Sleepers, 2024. Mixed media, paper, strings, video projectors, and aluminum; Dimensions variable. Denver Art Museum: Modern and Contemporary Art acquisition funds and support from David Gill, Nisha and Viraj Mehta, and Takeo Obayashi, 2024.897.1-3.
Sarah Sze, Sleepers, 2024. Mixed media, paper, strings, video projectors, and aluminum; Dimensions variable. Denver Art Museum: Modern and Contemporary Art acquisition funds and support from David Gill, Nisha and Viraj Mehta, and Takeo Obayashi, 2024.897.1-3.
Since the late 1990s, Sze has created expansive and idiosyncratic sculptures that begin with fractal-like compositions and explode into architectural space. Suffusing her dynamic constellations of everyday objects and materials with moving image projections, Sze conflates physical and digital environments to bring us closer to our current reality. To create Sleepers, the artist filmed and recorded using her iPhone and culled from various online stock footage libraries. Sleepers is Sze’s first artwork with recorded and edited sound, with everyday life serving as the primary focus of her work.
In Sleepers, Sze asks us to consider the nature of reality and the intimate relationship between images and memory. Do we know what it feels like to scale a rocky mountain or to be swallowed by a wave? Did we witness yesterday’s sunset, or did we see it on our phones? Enveloping viewers in a stream of shifting videos projected onto hand-torn paper screens, Sze’s visuals are fractured yet made whole through inference, intuition and repetition of forms. Appearing as ghostly apparitions, they cast their shadows onto the gallery walls and quickly dissipate to the click of a camera's shutter. As visitors find themselves caught in a whirlwind of moving images, a warm cello vibrato evokes the weight of deep slumber, while the sound of labored breathing recalls the thrill of running through a forest in wild abandon. A whistle call beckons viewers to return.
“I am thrilled to introduce our museum audience to the peerless work of Sarah Sze, and to mark the debut of Sleepers (2024) in the U.S. with the re-launch of Fuse Box. The Fuse Box series is designed to showcase new media artworks such as Sleepers, the perfect artwork to kick start this series again. It’s a work that pushes the boundaries between various mediums and blurs the distinctions between analog and digital technologies. This is a cornerstone of Sze’s artistic practice and the Fuse Box series offers our museum audience the opportunity to engage with artworks created by some of the foremost artists and thinkers of our times,” said Rory Padeken, Vicki and Kent Logan Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Denver Art Museum.
Sarah Sze, Sleepers, 2024. Mixed media, paper, strings, video projectors, and aluminum; Dimensions variable. Denver Art Museum: Modern and Contemporary Art acquisition funds and support from David Gill, Nisha and Viraj Mehta, and Takeo Obayashi, 2024.897.1-3.
The Fuse Box art series, launched in 2008, is a project space dedicated to the presentation of significant new media artworks created by artists recognized for their pioneering practices in film, video, sound, animation and computer programming, including gaming, internet art, virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, machine learning and other nascent technologies.
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About the Denver Art Museum
The Denver Art Museum is an educational, nonprofit resource that sparks creative thinking and expression through transformative experiences with art. Its holdings reflect the city and region—and provide invaluable ways for the community to learn about cultures from around the world. Metro area residents support the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD), a unique funding source serving hundreds of metro Denver arts, culture and scientific organizations. For museum information, call 720-865-5000 or visit www.denverartmuseum.org.
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