Barbara Strigel
A Space becomes an Entry
Aug 7 - 30 , 2025
For the past 10 years, I have been working on a series of projects that circle around the question, “how do we perceive urban space?” My initial interest was in street photography. I had moved to a city after years of living in the suburbs and I thought I might be able to convey the sense of possibility I found in urban life by photographing on the street. As I walked alone with my camera, I found myself drawn to solitary figures, each purposefully striding forward. I imagined us all connected, alone but together in the shared space. I realized that my perception was a construct: a personal and idiosyncratic collection of ideas I'd assembled shaped by Frank O’Hara’s poetry, Edward Hopper's paintings, Romare Bearden's collages and all the street photographers who had found their subjects in cities. As I tried to understand what my photographs were about, I realized that architecture was a primary interest. I was attentive to the layers of time in the surfaces of walls and sense of scale suggested by certain buildings. I was not thinking of my photographs as documentary, I saw them as interpretations. Through digital collage, I began layering my photographs with scans of drawings, torn paper, and printmaking experiments, creating what felt like approximations of space—not a particular city, but a city remembered, a city imagined.
While reading about architecture, I came across the ideas of Aldo Rossi, the visionary Italian architect who believed that architecture could express intangible longings and that it was, at its core, a search for meaning. Inspired by Rossi’s ideas, I developed a series of architectural collages titled If We Were to Talk About Architecture. A few of these are included in this exhibition. These works aim to evoke rather than describe—a slant of light on stucco, a distant façade. There's a lightness to the space in these images that comes from the interplay between the fragments of photographs and the collage interventions.
This exhibition also includes work from a more recent series, Expect Delays, which shifts focus to the surface relationships of shape and form in urban construction zones. In these collages, rows of rebar punctuate the skyline and fencing unwinds on the ground below. The images are lively and graphic, with movement in the curve of bulldozers and the thrust of cranes. Construction zones contain the forward momentum of cities made visible and there's a sense of exuberance in these compositions. Construction zones don't hold the weight of our past experiences and associations in the same way that architectural spaces do so they allow us to consider our perception of space from a purely visual perspective.
I believe there is value in both ways of thinking about urban space. If we can connect to the spaces we inhabit, perhaps we can broaden our experience of them. A Space becomes an Entry invites you to reflect on how we perceive the spaces around us.
In-Person Artist Talk
Sat, Aug 9 at 2 PM
Barbara Strigel (American/Canadian, b.1957, she/her) is a photographer, collage artist and bookmaker based in Vancouver, British Columbia. She studied photography and printmaking at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and spent over twenty years teaching photography, pottery, and graphic design at a public high school.
Strigel works in digital collage, layering fragments of her street photography with drawings, torn paper, and printmaking experiments. She is interested in architecture and how we perceive the built environment. Strigel’s work draws a visual and conceptual thread between modernist abstraction and the everyday urban landscape.
Her work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, and Australia, and is held in public and private collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Otis College of Art and Design; and Baylor University. She has been interviewed by Lenscratch, Contemporary Collage Magazine, Boooooooom, Medium, and Gallery Photographs in Tokyo.