Object Record
Images
Metadata
Artist |
Sperber, Devorah |
Title |
After Mona Lisa 8 |
Medium |
1482 thread-spools, stainless steel ball-chain and hanging apparatus, clear |
Date |
2010 |
Description |
Devorah Sperber (Detroit, 1961; lives and works in New York) After the Mona Lisa 8, 2010 1482 thread spools, stainless-steel ball chain and hanging apparatus, acrylic sphere, metal stand 68 x 47 inches Knoxville Museum of Art, 2013 purchase with funds provided by KMA Collectors Circle Devorah Sperber explores the connections between art and technology, and ways in which visible reality is perceived by the human mind. She became aware that an iconic image seen repeatedly becomes memorized so that complete visual information is no longer needed for recognition to occur. This concept is called neurological priming-the ability of the viewer to decode visual patterns as an identifiable picture using mental imprints from prior viewings. Before assembling materials into complex works of art, Sperber uses digital software to prepare her selected images-in this case, Leonardo's Mona Lisa. After scanning an image into her computer, she reduces it to a grid of individual color pixels. The grids serve as maps for her labor-intensive process of matching each grid color using certain types of commonly available objects. The artist chose thread spools because they come in countless hues, and because of their association with issues of women's labor. To the unaided eye, Sperber's thread spool works appear either abstract or upside down. They resolve into something familiar only when viewed through her specially-designed acrylic gazing balls. Through this innovative approach, Sperber calls attention to the powerful hold of iconic images on the mind while creating interactive works of art that comfortably exist between past and present, abstraction and representation, and object and illusion. |
Catalog Number |
2013.06.01 |
Search Terms |
Sculpture Thread Steel Metals Women Artists |
Credit line |
Knoxville Museum of Art purchase with funds provided by KMA Collectors Circle |