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Interiority is a concept that multimedia artist Sarah Sze has been fixating on lately.

“So much of what we experience is actually interior,” Sze said in a recent video interview. “We’ve become so exterior focused. We’re so outward looking.”

At a time when it’s all too easy to consume a never-ending stream of social media images, the celebrated New York-based artist is more interested in scrolling through the images stored inside her own mind.

Her new show, “Feel Free,” champions the mind’s eye, in all its random, fragmented glory. It brings a collection of new paintings and two immersive video installations to Gagosian Beverly Hills.

Sze is known for her unconventional sculptures and large-scale paintings, which she’s shown in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, LACMA and the U.S. Pavilion at multiple Venice Biennales. In 2023, she left her mark on both the inside halls and the exterior walls of the Guggenheim Museum, and her public sculptures have transformed a grassy hillside as well as a pine grove and an international airport.

Sarah Sze’s Gagosian Beverly Hills show “Feel Free” is meant to feel intimate.

(Ariana Drehsler/For The Times)

At the Gagosian show, Sze leaned into the intimate and fragile, while continuing her signature experimental streak.

In one of her newest pieces, “Once in a Lifetime” — part sculpture, part video display — precarious clusters of bric-a-brac form a mechanical marvel that appears to defy gravity.

A stack of small projectors is cradled inside of a fantastical tower fashioned out of crisscrossed tripods, metal poles and ladders festooned with an assemblage of toothpick structures, empty cardboard containers that once held crayons and Lactaid, dangling prisms, arts & crafts scraps, and paper cut-outs of deer and wolves (figures that appear throughout the show).

The bare gallery walls surrounding the monument flash with rotating projections of construction sites where buildings are being erected and demolished, clouds drifting across tranquil blue skies, and city lights twinkling then slowly dissolving into floating fractals. The Dadaist piece is every bit as off-kilter and fascinating as the Talking Heads song that inspired its title.

“Once in a Lifetime” is part video display and part sculpture, made of tripods, toothpicks, lights, cardboard boxes and projectors that flicker images on the gallery walls. (Ariana Drehsler/For The Times)

“The most important thing about my show is that I hope it’s really challenging and exciting and gives young artists license to do what they want to do,” Sze said.

“When they come in and say, ‘Wait … I didn’t know you could put up toothpicks going to the ceiling and throw a video through it and make it into a movie. I didn’t know you could put a pile of things on the floor in front of a painting.’ It’s like, ‘OK! Yes, you can!’”

Meanwhile, large canvases in the main gallery space are covered with oil and acrylic paints and printed backdrops dotted with an assortment of images: sleeping female figures; hands pointing, drawing and flashing peace signs; the sun at different stages of setting; birds in flight; wolves and deer in their natural habitats. Layered on top are paint splotches and streaks, as well as taped-on paper and vellum, blurring and obscuring the collage of figures underneath.

“Escape Artist,” left, “White Night” and “Feel Free,” are new paintings by Sarah Sze at Gagosian Beverly Hills.

(Ariana Drehsler/For The Times)

“One of the things I was thinking about was when we dream and then we wake up, there’s this extreme, fleeting moment where you’re trying to grasp the dream,” Sze said. “The dream is disappearing at the same time, and you’re trying to re-create those images.”

She went on to describe “a landscape turning into a different landscape, and then you’re falling, and then you’re turning, and then someone appears that you didn’t expect to be there.”

In addition to this spree of the subconscious, the artist offers glimpses of her creative process. Pooled on the ground below the canvases (and even dangling from the rafters above) is an assortment of the tools of her trade — from tape measures to paint scrapers. Brushes, pens and pencils lie next to the ripped cuffs of cotton workshirts, and drops of blue and white paint are splattered on the floor, extending the artwork beyond the wall.

Sze spent five days installing the show inside the gallery and the commonplace supplies incorporated into the pieces are what she dubbed “remnants of the workspace.”

“Sleepers,” a video installation Sze debuted in 2024, plays with the light entering through a gallery window. Images of sleeping heads and forest animals play amid the sound of cello notes and deep breathing.

(Ariana Drehsler/For The Times)

If the paintings act as snapshots of dreamscapes, “Sleepers,” the video installation she debuted in 2024, sets those images in motion. Dozens of hand-torn paper fragments connected by rows of string become miniature projection screens, each flashing with images of the same sleeping heads, busy hands and forest animals. These are interspersed with flashes of TV static and ocean waves, all set to the sounds of humming, disjointed cello notes and deep breathing.

Directly in the center, a slender vertical window — part of the gallery’s architecture — illuminates the otherwise darkened room with a pillar of natural light, further contributing to the ethereal nature of the piece.

Viewed at the right angle, the piece resembles a giant eye. It’s the perfect visual cue to get visitors thinking about what we see and how we see it.

The Trump administration has not shied away from sharing AI-generated imagery online, embracing cartoonlike visuals and memes and promoting them on official White House channels.

But an edited — and realistic — image of civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong in tears after being arrested is raising new alarms about how the administration is blurring the lines between what is real and what is fake.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s account posted the original image from Levy Armstrong’s arrest before the official White House account posted an altered image that showed her crying. The doctored picture is part of a deluge of AI-edited imagery that has been shared across the political spectrum since the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti by U.S. Border Patrol officers in Minneapolis

However, the White House’s use of artificial intelligence has troubled misinformation experts who fear the spreading of AI-generated or AI-edited images erodes public perception of the truth and sows distrust.

In response to criticism of the edited image of Levy Armstrong, White House officials doubled down on the post, with Deputy Communications Director Kaelan Dorr writing on X that the “memes will continue.” White House Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson also shared a post mocking the criticism.

David Rand, a professor of information science at Cornell University, says calling the altered image a meme “certainly seems like an attempt to cast it as a joke or humorous post, like their prior cartoons. This presumably aims to shield them from criticism for posting manipulated media.” He said the purpose of sharing the altered arrest image seems “much more ambiguous” than the cartoonish images the administration has shared in the past.

Memes have always carried layered messages that are funny or informative to people who understand them, but indecipherable to outsiders. AI-enhanced or AI-edited imagery is just the latest tool the White House uses to engage the segment of Trump’s base that spends a lot of time online, said Zach Henry, a Republican communications consultant who founded Total Virality, an influencer marketing firm.

“People who are terminally online will see it and instantly recognize it as a meme,” he said. “Your grandparents may see it and not understand the meme, but because it looks real, it leads them to ask their kids or grandkids about it.”

All the better if it prompts a fierce reaction, which helps it go viral, said Henry, who generally praised the work of the White House’s social media team.

The creation and dissemination of altered images, especially when they are shared by credible sources, “crystallizes an idea of what’s happening, instead of showing what is actually happening,” said Michael A. Spikes, a professor at Northwestern University and news media literacy researcher.

“The government should be a place where you can trust the information, where you can say it’s accurate, because they have a responsibility to do so,” he said. “By sharing this kind of content, and creating this kind of content … it is eroding the trust — even though I’m always kind of skeptical of the term trust — but the trust we should have in our federal government to give us accurate, verified information. It’s a real loss, and it really worries me a lot.”

Spikes said he already sees the “institutional crises” around distrust in news organizations and higher education, and feels this behavior from official channels inflames those issues.

Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor at UCLA and the host of the “Utopias” podcast, said many people are now questioning where they can turn to for “trustable information.” “AI systems are only going to exacerbate, amplify and accelerate these problems of an absence of trust, an absence of even understanding what might be considered reality or truth or evidence,” he said.

Srinivasan said he feels the White House and other officials sharing AI-generated content not only invites everyday people to continue to post similar content but also grants permission to others who are in positions of credibility and power, such as policymakers, to share unlabeled synthetic content. He added that given that social media platforms tend to “algorithmically privilege” extreme and conspiratorial content — which AI generation tools can create with ease — “we’ve got a big, big set of challenges on our hands.”

An influx of AI-generated videos related to Immigration and Customs Enforcement action, protests and interactions with citizens has already been proliferating on social media. After Good was shot by an ICE officer while she was in her car, several AI-generated videos began circulating of women driving away from ICE officers who told them to stop. There are also many fabricated videos circulating of immigration raids and of people confronting ICE officers, often yelling at them or throwing food in their faces.

Jeremy Carrasco, a content creator who specializes in media literacy and debunking viral AI videos, said the bulk of these videos are likely coming from accounts that are “engagement farming,” or looking to capitalize on clicks by generating content with popular keywords and search terms such as ICE. But he also said the videos are getting views from people who oppose ICE and DHS and could be watching them as “fan fiction,” or engaging in “wishful thinking,” hoping that they’re seeing real pushback against the organizations and their officers.

Still, Carrasco also believes that most viewers can’t tell if what they’re watching is fake, and questions whether they would know “what’s real or not when it actually matters, like when the stakes are a lot higher.”

Even when there are blatant signs of AI generation, like street signs with gibberish on them or other obvious errors, only in the “best-case scenario” would a viewer be savvy enough or be paying enough attention to register the use of AI.

This issue is, of course, not limited to news surrounding immigration enforcement and protests. Fabricated and misrepresented images following the capture of deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro exploded online earlier this month. Experts, including Carrasco, think the spread of AI-generated political content will only become more commonplace.

Carrasco believes that the widespread implementation of a watermarking system that embeds information about the origin of a piece of media into its metadata layer could be a step toward a solution. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity has developed such a system, but Carrasco doesn’t think that will become extensively adopted for at least another year.

“It’s going to be an issue forever now,” he said. I don’t think people understand how bad this is.”

Huamani writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix and Barbara Ortutay in San Francisco contributed to this report.