Installation Art
Installation art began with Dadaist Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau (1933), an architecturally scaled collage that one could enter. Contemporary installation art, or environmental art, grew rapidly in the 1990s when artists combined light, projection, sound, and non-traditional objects and materials to create immersive multimedia environments. Installation art highlights audience experience—both a viewer’s physical relationship to the art and the emotional or sensory effects it provokes. Sara Sze’s room-sized Book of Parts invites a dynamic experience of space through shifts in scale that disorient and reorient the viewer at every turn.