Last look at Barbara Astman: Concealed/Revealed

Diamond Zhou
Jun 6
2 min read

welcome to our

SATURDAY EVENING POST

June 7th, 2025

As Barbara Astman: Concealed/Revealed draws to a close today, we extend our heartfelt gratitude to everyone who walked through the gallery, paused, looked deeply, and allowed this remarkable body of work to speak to them. We are grateful to Barbara Astman for her generosity in sharing decades of visual inquiry and experimentation with us. This exhibition offered not only a survey of an exceptional career but a glimpse into the ways that image-making can reflect not just the artist’s inner world but the social and cultural pulse of the time. Her works, layered with history and memory, reminded us that art is never made in a vacuum, it records, it responds, and it reveals what mattered in the society from which it emerged.

What emerged, too, was a portrait of the artist as a visionary collector, not of objects in the casual sense, but of moments, materials, textures, and symbols. Throughout the exhibition, we came to recognize how many artists draw from personal archives, from gathered fragments and saved ephemera, to construct meaning and shape their work. In Astman’s case, these gathered elements became the foundation of deeply introspective and outward-looking creations. Her curiosity and refusal to be pared down to a single medium or mode of expression meant that each series offered a new language of communication — whether working with Polaroids, type overlays, image transfers, or digital manipulations, she made the medium itself speak, pushing beyond its technical boundaries. Few artists have explored the poetics of the lens as fluently and inventively as Astman has.

To those who knew only of her Loverboy album cover, this exhibition came as a revelation. They encountered instead a rich, prolific, and unceasingly experimental career, one that, for many west coast audiences, had remained at a distance until now. We are grateful to have had the opportunity to close that gap.

To Barbara, thank you for your continued commitment to the work, to reinvention, and to truth-telling through images. And to our audience, thank you for slowing down, for letting the work in, and for seeing not only what was concealed and revealed in the images, but what was stirred and recognized within yourselves. It has been an honour to present this exhibition.