I’ve never been to an art exhibition before where I’ve blurted out, “Wow!” in genuine amazement, as I did this past weekend at the Brooklyn Museum show, The Eye of the Artist: The Work of Devorah Sperber.

Sperber, a New York-based installation artist, created seven pieces using thousands of spools of colorful thread, arranged and connected by aluminum ball chains, and hung upside-down on the gallery walls. When viewed by the naked eye, the works appear to be large, pixilated abstractions. A few feet in front of each of these pieces are thin, metal poles, each topped with a small, clear, acrylic ball. When you peer through the sphere, you see that the neatly arranged spools of thread are reproductions of familiar masterpieces, like da Vinci’s The Last Supper and Mona Lisa, Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein, and van Eyck’s Man in a Red Turban.

A former stone carver from Colorado, Sperber’s process for creating her wow-inspiring artwork sounds rather simple and almost makes me wonder, “Why didn’t I think of that?” But then, of course, I don’t have the eye, talent, or patience that Sperber clearly possesses!

In the Artist’s Statement posted on her Web site, and dated July, 2001, Sperber explains that her “current body of work consists of sculptures assembled from thousands of ordinary objects—spools of thread, marker pen caps, map tacks, etc. The imagery is derived from photographs, which I digitally manipulate and translate into ‘low-tech’ pixels.” In an interview with the Art Institute of Colorado’s alumni news, Sperber said, “While many contemporary artists utilize digital technology to create high-tech works, I strive to ‘dumb-down’ technology by utilizing mundane materials and low-tech, labor-intensive assembly processes.”  

According to an article in The Wichita Eagle, Sperber was inspired to create these works in 1999, after viewing Chuck Close’s color-blocked paintings at New York’s MoMA. The artist’s first experiment with this process involved taking an image of a lake and blowing it up 1,600 times on her computer, so that the image became intensely pixilated in “series of tiny, separate blocks of color.” She then matched each tiny block to the color of one of over five thousand spools of thread she had purchased from Coats & Clark, finally attaching all of them together, and recreating her original image.