The thread spool columns are strung onto aluminum ball chain and hang to form an open-ended trapezoid. Like the original mural, the Christ figure's right eye is centered and serves as the single vanishing point. The two 45 degree angles of the trapezoid reference the site-specific nature of the original mural (the illusion of being an extension of the interior architecture).

When seen with the naked eye, the spools of thread appear as an abstract arrangement of multi-colored blocks/3D pixels, further abstracted by the fact that The Last Supper imagery is upside down and backwards. The clear acrylic viewing spheres rotate the imagery 180 degrees back to the correct orientation and condense the individual pixels/spools of thread into recognizable images. In addition, each sphere offers a different monocular view of the work, accentuating the illusion of 3 dimension as it exists in flat paintings. Leonardo da Vinci understood that the illusion of 3D in paintings was derived from monocular, not binocular, vision.

The original mural is highly symmetrical, with the right eye of the Christ figure as the single, centered vanishing point, from which all compositional elements project. In this installation, the vanishing point, also Christ's right eye is slightly lower than eye level. Because the spheres rotate the imagery 180 degrees, viewers have the illusion of looking up at the image, replicating the orientation of viewers to the original mural.

Installation view (seen from right side)

ARTICLES & REVIEWS

Trouw Newspaper
The Netherlands
(August 18, 2007)

Devorah Sperber is a New York-based artist whose sculptures, composed of thousands of ordinary objects, negotiate a terrain between low and high tech. Her labor-intensive works explore repetition and the effects of digital technology on perception, scale, and subjective reality. -Patricia Phillips, Executive Editor, Art Journal