March 2020– The material for Justin Lieberman’s collages is sourced from pages of a comic book featuring Steve Ditko’s character “The Question”, a right wing libertarian vigilante inspired by his creator’s deep devotion to Ayn Rand’s “objectivist” philosophy. Lieberman uses the negative space between the panels to construct dense patterns and forms, squeezing what remains of the images into smaller and smaller containers.
For his edition with Michel Obultra, Lieberman has chosen the medium of scanning and light jet photographic c-prints to reproduce his collages, and allowed the edges of the stack to remain within the borders of the image. In his own words, “The artistic presentation of photographic reproductions of works made in other media would not even make us blink today were it not for the hegemonic presence of readymades and appropriation art. There are other shapes for the conjunction of art and technology than those which in the first instance, pose the work of art as a commodity”
“Pure Multiplicity” is an explication of the impossibility of the one. The motif of an uneven brick wall is presented as an “inconsistent multiple”, a basic, primary hypothesis of what-must-have-existed in being before that time when it was counted, or named in its consistency.