Restaurant -Hour
of Detroit
the magazine
Year
2004
Memory Lights
Barbara Astman draws on the faces of Jewish
Canadians displaced by war for exhibit at Art
Gallery of Windsor.
LYNNE KONSTANTIN
Special to the Jewish News
T
hree years ago, Barbara
Astman was browsing
Canada's National Post when
her eyes settled on a photograph.
"What a beautiful image," the
Toronto resident thought to herself,
and looked closer at the smiling,
happy faces of a group of well-
dressed children and young adults in
what appeared to be a historical
photo.
"Isn't that nice?" she thought,
moving in to read the caption. What
it described was smiling Jewish
orphans arriving from Europe to
Canada, taken circa 1948.
'At that moment, I was struck,"
Astman says. "Looking at these
happy, smiling children, you realize
what they've just been through. That
they're orphans, and what they must
have just come out of. And they're
smiling. It's chilling."
Motivated by that one photo-
graph, Astman, a photographic artist
represented by the Corkin Shopland
Gallery in Toronto and a professor
of photography at Toronto's Ontario
College of Art and Design, was
'
inspired to create Clementine Part I,
a photographic installation that will
be on display at the Art Gallery of
Windsor through Jan. 16.
At the same time, Astman came
across the photograph in the news-
paper, she was working on a corn-
mission for the Wolfond Centre for
Jewish Campus Life at the
University of Toronto, a project she
conceptualized in collaboration with
the center's architect.
Her part of the project consisted
of a series of 12 photographically
etched glass windows for the center's
Spiritual Room, all drawn from pho-
tographs of historical and current
Jewish life.
In an effort to create a Jewish
identity for the center, "I was
researching Jewish history and cul-
ture for that project at the Ontario
Jewish Archives," which records the
substantial Jewish history in that
province, explains the artist.
"I was going through the archives
and creating the windows, and I
couldn't stop thinking about all the
faces in the photos I was looking at.
I started thinking about the orphans
in the newspaper picture and of
Holocaust survivors. It started me
wondering about how I could use
the faces in a project."
Her vision included a darkened
room strung with tiny lights. "I'm
very interested in ready-made things.
I like to use them in my work. So I
used what are theoretically
Christmas lights," explains Astman.
"But my Italian friend calls them
Tivoli lights; my Indian friend says
they're what they use to decorate for
weddings. So I just call them festive
lights.
Astman then scanned photos
culled from the archives, as well as
from friends and family. "The one
criteria was that the people in the
photographs had to be Jewish.
They're not all necessarily survivors,
but they had to be Jewish," she
notes.
Growing up in Rochester, N.Y.,
Astman was raised with a very strong
identity as a cultural Jew. Though
she today describes herself as secular,
she also readily points out that she
"experiences the world, responds to
things," as a Jew.
After scanning the photographs on
quarter-sized discs of transparent
acetate, Astman attached the images
to the festive lights so that each little
light has a face on it. There are 30
strings of lights, and each string has
about 50 lights on it.
Projecting the faces onto the sur-
face areas of the gallery, they become
hundreds of ghostly images from the
past, illuminated on the gallery's
walls, floor and ceiling. At the same
time, the faces are imbued with a
magical sense of optimism and the
power of the human spirit to over-
come unspeakable horrors.
The project is not only about
Jewish culture, although that is a
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