2014
The Lowdown: Jerusalem-born, Berlin-based Steve Sabella's exploration of personal cultural provenance suffuses his work with relatable meaning. Although Metamorphosis may, on first look, emerge as a tiled collage composition that resembles the aesthetic of Cubism — from far away it may even recall a microcosm of Paul Cézanne's technique in the 1885 painting Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from Bellevue — there's deeper significance in the process that's set in motion by the repetitive layering of different perspectives of the same image.
As Sabella's constructivist approach disintegrates the original milieu so does the journey into the discovery of the self. The window, often a symbol that serves as a portal to another sometimes unattainable world, is used as a unit that is examined ad nauseam to render something completely new and different. Through this play on perception, Sabella comments on the painful exercise of examining who we are as individuals — over and over again — to extrapolate a better understanding of our place in society.
Sabella's work says to us: Although personal change is inevitable, we always retain kernels of our past — for perpetuity. And that's a good thing.
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