The article summarizes a survey exhibition of Canadian artist Barbara Astman's work at Corkin Gallery in Toronto. It highlights how Astman's early self-portraits from the 1970s-80s used photography and text to explore identity and narrative. More recent works like "The Newspaper Series" manipulate collected media imagery to capture the passage of time. While the exhibition effectively pairs different scales of Astman's pieces, the reviewer notes some series were only partially represented or missing, leaving a desire to see more of her pioneering conceptual photography.

1. E D I TO R I A L O N V I E W FA I R S V I D E O A C A D E M Y L O G I N
R E V IE W - 03 JU N 2 0 1 6
Barbara Astman
B Y S A R A K N E L M A N
Corkin Gallery, Toronto, Canada
In 1980, Barbara Astman – dressed head to toe in black, wide-eyed and smoking against
a red studio backdrop, wearing matching nail polish and lipstick – posed for a Polaroid
self-portrait that became the cover of rock band Loverboy’s self-titled debut album. As
the emulsion dried, she fed the picture into a typewriter and punched song lyrics over
the top: ‘Hey LOVERBOY how can I make you love me how can I make you mine how
can I make it all when you don’t know what goes on inside…’ The commission, still one
of Astman’s best-known images, plays on the disarming questions and visual strategies
that have remained preoccupations throughout the artist’s 40-year career. This survey
at Toronto’s Corkin Gallery takes stock of her prescient considerations of pop culture
imagery, her brave and vulnerable explorations of identity and narrative, and her
perpetual experimentation with photographic materiality and technologies.
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T W I T T E R
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F A C E B O O K
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E M A I L
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P I N T E R E S T
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2. Barbara Astman, I as
artifact #4, 2008-14,
archival pigment
print, pressed organic
face mask, 91 x
91 cm. All images
courtesy: Corkin
Gallery, Toronto;
photographs: ©
Michael Cullen
The
exhibition is a rare
chance to see a
critical mass of
Astman’s imaginative
and pioneering work
from the late 1970s
and ’80s. Among the
earliest pieces, the
mini anti-dramas of
‘Visual Narratives’
(1978–79) show figures
shifting uncomfortably
across a grid of
Polaroids, each
bearing enigmatic text
on its lower edge. ‘She
pretended to enjoy herself,’ reads one, depicting Astman dressed in a floral blouse,
barely distinguishable against flower-patterned wallpaper. The series’ diaristic,
handmade intimacy expands in I was thinking about you (1979) – for which the artist
typed letters to friends directly onto developing Polaroid self-portraits, then
re-photographed and enlarged them – and again in ‘Red Series’ (1981), where she
appears amidst household tools curiously spray-painted red. We might situate Astman
amongst women artists of the 1980s – Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae
Weems or Hannah Wilke – yet there’s a specific wit and material curiosity in Astman’s
work, which borrows not only from cinema and mass media but also from surrealism,
fashion and even television soap opera. A great technological innovator, Astman was
among the first to experiment with Xerography in the 1970s, and has produced digital
scans of dryer lint and facial masks as well as meticulous packing tape transfers of
newspaper images.
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3. Barbara Astman,
‘The Newspaper
Series’, 2006, archival
pigment prints from
stitched
photographs, each
strip, 43 x 290 cm
Though Astman has continued to use her own body – or traces of it – in her work over
the years, much of her recent practice focuses less on self-representation than on the
media’s portrayal of current events. For ‘The Newspaper Series’ (2006–07), Astman
stockpiled a year’s worth of newspapers, photographed them in heaps and digitally
stitched the resulting images together as 52 separate strips, each nearly three metres
long. We might read them as a snapshot of the world at certain moment in time, as
selective memories or as a marker of print media’s swift decline. In Daily Collage (2011),
Astman more invasively manipulates media imagery, crafting surrealist collages on the
thin, lined pages of a small notebook. Re-photographed and enlarged, we see not only
the spreads from each day’s work, but the ghosts of the pages before and after. An
acute awareness of elapsed time, thought and manual labour is often embedded in
Astman’s images – though there is a simplicity and agility, too, that comes from the
pared down, formal presentations she favours.
Barbara Astman | Frieze https://www.frieze.com/article/barbara-astman
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4. Barbara
Astman, Daily
Collage, 2011,
archival pigment
prints from original
collages, each 89 x
112 cm
The sense of slow accumulation is everywhere in the gallery; Astman is a great collector
of objects and habits, as well as an interpreter of the roles they play in personal or
collective histories. Rather than presenting a chronological or thematic overview of
Astman’s career, the show plays off the conceptual and aesthetic resonances that
punctuate these materials. A repurposed mill in Toronto’s Distillery District, Corkin
Gallery’s eccentric architecture – with its grand industrial spaces and quiet nooks –
complements the different scales and moods of the images on view: large, museum-
worthy wall hangs adjoin more intimate, half-hidden confrontations. Nonetheless,
Astman’s series are often represented by only one or two works while some are absent
entirely, and larger installations aren’t assigned the room they require. I left wanting
more.
SAR A K N E L MAN
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T W I T T E R
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F A C E B O O K
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E M A I L
T O
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P I N T E R E S T
B A R B A R A A S T M A N C O R K I N G A L L E R Y T O R O N T O
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5. R E V I E W S A R A K N E L M A N
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