SPLASH MOUNTAINS

About the Item: Barbara Strasen manipulates memories by finding the malleable moments of perception. In the “S” series, a figure appears in each painting. Yet, it is only a silhouette, blending into the architecture and backgrounds. For the artist, this figure’s identity and significance are personal. For the viewers, she crafts mysterious worlds. Is the figure going into a cave, or perhaps emerging from it? The exhibition at SEFA Hudson presents three canvases from Strasen’s series. Viewers see this ambiguous figure in a blue architectural drapery, a textured red firestorm and a confetti haze amongst a pastel sky. Her creations reside in an unknown state that echoes the human experience—beginnings and endings, obscurity and clarity.

Strasen states that she seeks “to slow people down and to be surprised.” In her painted lenticular prints, viewers are met with different images as they move across the piece. The works are combinations of multiple images, revealing that perception is not stable: “something is interrupted; something is underneath; something is alive and changing.” Strasen employs both nature and art history, with a particular fondness for Albrecht Dürer’s compositions and cloud formations that mingle with owls and suggestions of foliage.

The artist seeks to “take the ancient things and make them contemporary” and vice versa within her visual practice. Strasen achieves this through painted needlepoint equivalents and collage methods as well. She finds connections between seemingly unlike things within her layering, thus proving a new perspective on reality. In her work NEEDLEPOINT NEUROLOGY, she employs images of brain scans and layers them onto the surface using pigment acrylic and golden paint. The luminescent qualities throughout her work echo the changing and memorizing qualities of stained glass as viewers move throughout the space.