What can you do with a few hundred spools of thread in various colors? If you’re Devorah Sperber you can make amazing upside down portraits of pop culture icons and classical artworks that can only really be seen correctly with a large convex lens that helps squish the image together and flips it right side up again for your viewing pleasure.
Technically, the works could also be seen from a distance so your eyes would be able to view the spools as thread as mere color pigments instead of bulky objects, but unlike similar large-scale works by other artists, Sperber intentionally creates her designs for the use of the convex lens, which flips images. That means that if you backed up far enough to see the colors turn into their intended subjects, the image would still be upside down.
Of course, like any true artist, Sperber’s methods vary from piece to piece. She occasionally will create designs that are right side up and she has been known to use other materials besides thread.
For example, in these Star Trek images, she shied away from thread spools and instead turned to tiny faceted beads. This technique works particularly well on the members of the U.S.S. enterprise as it replicates the way the characters looked when they were being teleported (or “beamed”) to or from the ship.
I know some people on the site have a rather limited definition of illusions, but for those that are more open to artistic takes on our basic methods of perception, what do you think of Devorah’s work?
Are her anamorphic creations illusionish enough? And if you don’t consider them illusions, do you at least enjoy her art?
