Six Extremities

In an era in which almost every aspect of our lives is mapped, Netta Lieber Sheffer offers her viewers a chaotic map, and in so doing deprives them of the coordinates for navigation and the footholds for linear progress with a beginning, middle, and end. Lieber Sheffer inundates the walls and floor of the space with sheets of canvas painted with soil and charcoal, assembling them into a panoramic installation of a torn, distorted world. The generous gesture, ostensibly inherent in the act of unfolding, which reveals physical or conceptual spaces for all to see, is a mere appearance. In their arbitrary proximity—as if a thread has been stretched, contracting them into a forced neighborhood, whose gaps might be bridged only by the “miracle of Kwisatz Haderach” (a leap of distance)—the images and representations lack causality, rooting in reality, or logical derivation.