Netta
Lieber Sheffer

In my work, I incorporate different approaches to modern figurative painting. My paintings allow the viewer but a glimpse into traces of stories, loose-ends of constructed memories, and an overall sense of vague familiarity with a landscape here or a place there. To me, both memory and a sense of place are materials. Through investigating their ever-elusive nature, I question how we construct personal narratives in the first place. Using different images that I collect from personal, social, fictional and historical sources, I paste the images together to create a framework for a seemingly-familiar story. Guided by the elusiveness of both memory and place, I layer paint, blurred blots, and lines, and weave these images together seamlessly. However, the familiar scenes in my paintings hold off on actualizing any of the narratives offered. Instead, the viewer is confronted with the raw canvas as a physical space of occurrence, where traces and possibilities of stories may collide, but do not add up. My painting becomes a faded reminder of what is left in the space between memory and place, and what our relationship is to it, as I remind the viewer of painting's inherent impossibility of ever allowing for any narrative to fully exist.