Barbara Astman employs postcards to investigate a synthesis of personal memory and the hyperreal. Astman studies the language of visual imagery, engulfing the viewer in a narrative of detail and scale.
Her career has spanned more than 23 years of photo-based media innovations, but has always been about more than the lure of new technology. Astman’s staged and sequential work suggests issues of identity, systems of representation, gender perspectives and the anti-narrative of popular irony.” – Ihor Holubizky, art/text 1998
“In the early 1980s, there was a clear delineation between what was considered photography and what was classified as art, and I felt I didn’t fit into either category. That is when I started calling myself a camera artist – one that was working within the contemporary art world as a whole.” – Barbara Astman
An American who studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Barbara Astman came to Canada in 1970, during the Vietnam War. She has been exhibiting in public galleries and museums across Canada and abroad since 1975 at venues such as the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge, AB, George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, France and Galleria Luca Polazzoli in Milan, Italy. Astman has produced numerous public commissions, the most recent of which was for the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, in 2005. Barbara Astman is also a dedicated art professor who has mentored numerous emerging artists at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, where she has been teaching since the mid 1970s.
