Barbara Strigel

Sidetracked, 2021 is from my We were neither Here nor There series and was created by layering scanned paper scraps and brushstrokes over street photographs of figures who were walking below a bridge. I like the way snow allows footprints and tire tracks to preserve movement and the tentative feeling it gives to a familiar space. 

Barbara Strigel is a photographer, collage artist and bookmaker living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia. She was born in Philadelphia and studied photography and printmaking at the Museum School in Boston. For over 20 years, she was an art teacher in a public high school where she also advised the literary magazine and yearbook. Since her retirement in 2012, she has been actively establishing her fine art practice. Her digital collages, photographs and handmade books have been shown and collected in both Canada and the USA. In 2019, she was a finalist in Photo-Lucida's Critical Mass competition.

Barbara Strigel's work combines street photography and collaged abstraction. Themes of separation and connection are central to Strigel's work, which presents an "alone together" view of urban life. There is an expansive feeling in her constructed landscapes. Fragments of geography suggest a horizon line or imply architecture but the images are liminal spaces, thresholds between the internal and external.

Her process is a unique blend of digital and analogue. She creates torn paper collages and paintings which she scans into the computer, then digitally combines in layers with her photographs. The collage process blurs the boundaries between photography and painting and gives primacy to improvisation. Between the shifting rhythms of form and color in these prints, the original photographs remain as echoes.