...Sperber also uses thousands of common objects, but in a manner that is far from spontaneous. Reflections on a Lake is constructed of 5,760 spools of colored thread beaded along lengths of vinyl tubing hung on the wall. The piece is like a lovely abstract curtain. When the viewer looks through a set of reversed binoculars installed on a stand in front of the piece, an entirely different image emerges. The abstract curtain becomes a painting of the shoreline of a lake, with trees in the background and boulders along the shore. The piece was created by digitalizing a photograph of the lake, pixilating and numerically coding its colores, and creating a grid pattern on which to bead the spools of thread.

Sperber uses a similar paint-by-numbers approach in Lie Like a Rug, in which 18,000 colored-marker pen caps, attached to an undulating canvas stiffened with gesso on the floor of the gallery, take on the patterns of an intricate Oriental fug when viewed through a convex mirror on the wall. By placing the works in the gallery in such a way that the viewer cannot get far enough back to see the image directly without the aid of optical devices, Sperber makes a point about how our perception of the world is dictated by the lenses through which we view it. Optical devices (including our own eyes) are one kind of lens. Our intellectual preconceptions are another.-Frank Green, 3-6-2002