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. 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