Combining Sensual with Conceptual

SA Jewish Report, 2000. Robyn Sassen

Is it always necessary to reveal secrets? This was a question which immediately struck me on confronting the profound aesthetic of Kim Lieberman's recent work. The exhibition opened on November 1 by Rabbi Michael Katz of Chabad, Illovo, in the name of gematria and kabbalah and their role in Lieberman's work.

Maybe it was constitutional, but perhaps not apt for the rabbi to so clearly orient the work in a Jewish esoteric ambit. This is work that shouldn't have to be easy to fit a specific framework of meaning.

I believe this is the case, because the work is so sophisticated visually - and because it contains such deep aesthetics and sensual realities, that it surpasses the nuts and bolts of direct confrontational interpretation.

It isn't necessary for me, the viewer, to understand the whys and wherefores of the production of the work. I'm quite satisfied to be able to lose myself in the subtleties of the work. To an extent, perhaps, as detailed and technical an explanation as the cone the rabbi presented, alienates.

Kim Lieberman is an artist who plays with combining the sensual with the conceptual. Her metaphorical focus is on the postal system. It contains intimations of love, loss, travel to distant places and identity.

While romanticising the realities of place in works like Amazon.com, her work remains a prosaic and witty comment on the machinations of Poste Restante throughout the country and indeed the world. It's also a poignant re-examination of bereavement, family ties and cultural realities.

Working with stamps, stamp-paper and silk thread from New York, Kim Lieberman is refreshingly conceptual. Her work is about the quietly repetitive gesture of drawing a thread with a needle across a piece of paper, and criss-crossing it in the opposite direction.

It's about the discordances and subtleties in a single range of colours that evokes the kind f patchwork landscape one can see from afar. It's about constructing a geography of this country, or this world, and creating meaning of correspondence in this framework.

As a show, it's both accessible and inaccessible. Being in a space with the noises of a busy Johannesburg arterial road just outside gives this gallery, which is quickly earning a reputation for being "cutting-edge", a sense of the idiosyncratic: It's not completely sanitised from the real world.

Significantly, this show's inner quietude conveys a sense of peace that feels almost oriental in relating to the hurly-burly outside.

Yes, Lieberman has used gematria in qualifying and justifying decisions taken. Yes, the formation of the Hebrew word is intrinsic to the construction of the works.

The overall impact, though, is universal, and framing it with Jewish esoterica serves to circumscribe its interpretation.

Viewing her work is about being able to draw from within oneself the necessary stillness to explore the subtleties in colour, in shadow between one white thread and the next. To look with wonder at how shades interchange as a thread crosses another - or as it lies parallel with another of the same colour.

This labour-intensive work is constructed on powerful emotions and a deep understanding of aesthetics. It's an exhibition which should be allowed to speak as much about harmony and technique, as about disquietude and disparity.

It's an exceptionally mature exhibition and one that cannot be ignored.

With two other solo exhibitions and an overseas scholarship already under her belt, Lieberman may be relatively new and young in the visual arts, but she is clearly destined to be here for a long time.