Barbara Strasen

I am a visual artist whose work is about finding beauty and harmony in the turbulence and complexity of apparently unrelated and contradictory images. My perennial focus is on finding unexpected visual connections between seemingly unlike images and ideas, and to discover new relationships between them. The sources of these images are wide-ranging, from the anthropology of nonwestern cultures to the biology of neural systems, and from the taxonomies of nature to cosmology and the Big Bang.

My art deals with the realization that every memory contains multiple perceptions, which layer themselves in some form of priority. Memories do not remain constant, but are the result of a continuing process of perception and re-perception, the mind constantly trying to reconcile the sublime with the horrific, the trivial with the vital. I have always been driven to make art that comments upon and re-presents these ideas, seeking to reveal the interconnectedness of all things.

Over the span of 30-plus years, I have taken different approaches to manifesting this vision, pushing boundaries of painting, photography and printmaking, and exploring other media to create multi-image works that reflect upon these complexities. My original artistic medium was painting, which has expanded to include digital printing, installations, and lenticular artworks. The result has been a variety of work, from gallery-sized paintings, prints and singular artworks to huge installations for a building lobby and an airport terminal.