Every Interaction Interrupts the Future

Art South Africa, 2003. Kathryn Smith

Kim Lieberman's exhibition Every Interaction Interrupts the Future revels in life's patterns - both planned and serendipitous, but which offer the opportunity to change the course of events. As she states, "For as long as there has existed a chain of events , each of these events has been pivotal in creating our lives as they are today. We are patterned together from the past and generate patterns that lead into the future."

While Interaction demonstrates a carefully conceptualized development from her previous exhibition, Blood Relatives (2003) , it also feels a great deal more personally charged, perhaps owing to the artist's recent pregnancy, an experience that tends to foreground issues of genealogy and family. Lieberman thankfully manages to avoid sentiment - her work has always been infused with a cool and calculating intellectualism, and this exhibition is no different.

The personal connection is evident in the predominance of figures rather than the threaded blocks of colour that formed the basis for much previous work. The latter reappear but are now strategically positioned in combination with silhouettes, and the single, stitched, blood red block that goes as her signature.

The work is dominated by red and white, colours that are considered symbolically powerful not only in Judaism but also in African And Eastern mythology. Issues of the universal or collective unconsciousness , given inflection by her by her personal desire and drive, seem to be woven through her intellectual and conceptual economy. Lieberman is drawn to the Kabbalah and the significance of numbers, which not only generate words but also and what Rory Doepal refers to as, "Ideaforces". Her figures stand in groups of 18(The number for Char -life- and associated with "my beloved"), also recurrent is the number 26, incidentally the code for the red thread she uses, as well as generating the word Hashem, meaning God.

Her inclination toward formal pattern making is present again, but infused with an organic sensibility. The grid offered by the perforations in large sheets of unprinted postage stamp paper acts as blueprint and guide over which Lieberman,and introduces aspects of "chance encounters", told through silhouettes of people she knows and those she's never met. The fluid qualities of paint and filigree designs are set off against the lines of silk thread. The exhibition also carries inter-textual references to previous works within the parameters of postal art.
Four panels with 18 figures each dominate the back wall. Carrying the same title as the exhibition, these are the keys to the show. Colour panels are positioned in relation to pats of the body and lines of thread shoot off in all directions, still tracking the grid, but implying the patterns of Life's experiences.

The silhouette is effective here perhaps owing to Lieberman's faithful tracing of outline and detail. Those figures we don't recognise become emblems of history, anthropology, desire, fantasy, and memory .Those we do jump out of the matrix in a manner that can only be described as uncanny, especially when they're standing alongside you at an opening.

A formalist at heart, informed by strong conceptualist tendencies, Lieberman's work straddles as a difficult divide between concept and object. Accompanied by a handsome catalogue designed by Fever, Every Interaction Interrupts the Future is a language system under construction, and predicts a path toward interesting developments in Lieberman's ongoing production.