GALLERY 881
881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_
EXPECT DELAYS
Exhibition by Barbara Strigel
Exhibition
April 1 - 30, 2025
Opening Reception
Saturday, April 5, 2025 from 2 - 5pm
Artist Tour
Saturday, April 26, 2025 from 2 - 3pm
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
In Expect Delays, construction zones become an entry point to visual thinking. Barbara Strigel layers fragments of her photographs with drawings and prints, assembling the built environment into studies of form and shape that evoke an urban rhythm prompting us to think about how we apprehend space. The artist states:
When I photograph a row of rebar, I enter a state of abstraction, capturing moments where form and space align. Artists have a language for the relationships within compositions – words like balance, unity, rhythm, and harmony. This way of thinking shapes my daily experience. If I can find balance in a stack of cinder blocks or unity in the lines of a fence, I can extend this perspective to the broader world. I believe in the value of visual thinking. A visual consideration of space can connect us to a place and allow us to appreciate the visual grace that surrounds us. Construction zones are temporary spaces, evoking past, present, and future time. They are the forward momentum of cities made visible. My digital collages are a way for me to represent this dynamism.
Expect Delays presents an expansive view of photography embracing both abstraction and representation.
ARTIST BIO
Barbara Strigel is a photographer, collage artist and bookmaker living in Vancouver, British Columbia. She was born in Philadelphia and studied photography and printmaking at the Museum School in Boston. For 20 years she taught photography, pottery and graphic design in a public high school. Since her retirement in 2013, she has been establishing her fine art practice.
Her work explores the perception of urban space and addresses themes relating to connection and visual thinking. She uses digital collage as a way of extracting a gesture or detail out of the photograph’s context of time and space. The fragmentary nature of collage connects to the idea of perception. The collaged image is both familiar and elusive, an idea of a place.
In addition to numerous public and private collections, she has work in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Otis College of Art and Design and Baylor University. Interviews are available on Lenscratch, Contemporary Collage Magazine, Boooooooo, Medium and Gallery Photographs, Tokyo. Upcoming shows include The Blue Sky Gallery, Portland and Head On Festival, Sydney.