In Diving for Dreams, which also serves as the title of the whole exhibition, five simple neon drawings are installed on three sections of an interior wall painted in the liminal hue of robin's egg-blue. These delicate light interventions around the perimeter of the Main Hall are pure poetry. The simplicity is deliberate and evokes folk art and children’s art and even art brut with stripped-down images of a baying wolf, hearth and home, heart, bed or divan, bird of prey. Steinman collated some of these outlines from immediate renderings she had asked people to make in response to their idea of ‘home’. She then executed a series of neon graffiti works that freely integrated those almost pictographic renderings as core subject matter -- and they stand as a source of authentic distillation of communal discourse.

In Niche, Steinman made use of a lucky find: the crevice on the towering back brick wall of the space. She installed a mirrored rectilinear glass panel. Letters in white glass meander across the reflecting surface: "to which we belong & which belongs to us". The suggestion of ownership and home and belonging is a thematic opening wedge that in fact unified the entire exhibition. We live in an economic climate where most 30-year-old Canadians are far less likely to own their own home than their baby boomer parents did at the same age. The national home ownership rate is in a state of continuing decline. Being at home, therefore, is related less to having a fixed abode and more to transitory, partial and provisional relationships with where we live. As is her usual wont, Steinman opens the parentheses on this phenomenon without recourse to aesthetic shock therapy. But the effect is no less profound, no less revelatory.

Niche, 2019. credit Christine Guest

Day and Night (1989) is the third facet of the exhibition. It is a powerful series of four staged photographs in light boxes. They depict an anonymous figure sheltering in the recessed alcove of an industrial building like the Darling Foundry in its earlier incarnation. It was originally executed specifically for the space above the atrium of the contemporary galleries at the National Gallery of Canada. It has now been removed from that context and stands on the floor plane here at specific intervals. Writing for another publication on Steinman’s Study for the Installation “Day and Night” a few years ago, I noted that she dilates with acuity on the nature of a shared social reality. In fact, Day and Night  is a profound meditation on homelessness by an artist who has always been attentive to the fate of the disenfranchised and the dispossessed. It is especially fitting because it is iconic for her practice of four decades and is not dated in any way. It is a piece of philosophical reparation for those whom history has hurt. Installed on the floor instead of lifted up on the wall plane, the large heartrending images provide a sort of moral weight for the more whimsical renderings in neon that shine down from above. Certainly, these light boxes have all the wherewithal we have come to expect of her practice before and since, and they are just as compelling as anything we have seen over the years by Jeff Wall, including his latest works at Gagosian.

Steinman works seamlessly and stealthily across the surface of things, a sort of covert operative on the go, searching out and assessing sites that she can palpate and bend to her purpose as a politically engaged artist. Yet her work is also profoundly chameleon and is less anchored in the specificity of given place than in a dynamic reflection on migration, home and the liminal. The exhibition transforms the former foundry into a metaphorical shelter safeguarding the promise of those left by the wayside of the historical process in a cascade of litanies that forms a potent critique of economic oppression and power relations.

Daring Others (Photo Souvenir) is a fitting coda for the show. Near the exit, visitors are invited to take home a postcard with an image of the facade of the Darling Brothers Foundry, referencing the original function of the building, and reversing polarities, so to speak, so that it is seen with all its attrition and effacement on display. It is ironic and clever and strangely numinous ephemera.

Writing on Steinman’s work 30 years ago, I quoted Frederic Jameson, the American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist of distinction. His words are as relevant to her endeavour now as they were then:

“History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its 'ruses' turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification; we may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them.' [1]  

Yes, history is what hurts and Steinman – in a voice never strident, sometimes elliptical, always radiant -- critiques the alienating necessities of History precisely so as to reclaim in present discourse those that History has estranged and dispossessed. She effectively memorialises subjects denied a common name, a concrete identity, a reasonable life. She has a savvy and acute political consciousness and her hugely sophisticated installations are socially symbolic acts. The works exhibited here are as luminous and nourishing as starlight on a clear night. 

Barbara Steinman in the Darling Foundry, 2019.

1. James D. Campbell, “History Hurts: Barbara Steinman and Installation as a Socially Symbolic Act” in ” C Magazine # 22, Summer 1989

Campbell, James D., Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, New York, NY, August 2019  

Steinman’s work is anything but predictable, ranging as it does from politically charged installation work to neon text pieces to outdoor public art; the photographic series in this exhibition are surprising and nuanced but also work to extend the process of reconfiguration that she recently discovered.

We can imagine that Steinman’s first recognition of the significance of the shredded, crushed, or tangled materials that she had sought to discard was an epiphany of continuity, of “the past … rolled into the present.” If this new work was par ally foretold in a recognizable but nonetheless individual way, Steinman also unintentionally participates in one of the founding legends of artistic creativity, that one can capitalize on the fleeting strangeness of one’s own production. A relevant example is Wassily Kandinsky’s claim in “Reminiscences” (1913) that he saw the way into abstraction by misrecognizing as revolutionary one of his own paintings that he had casually placed sideways against a wall in his studio.

In their visual precision and lushness, the elements reconfigured in these photographs insist on the present moment of a viewer’s contemplation. We have to be struck by the detail made visible, the marks of shredding, crushing, or tangling for example, and by the emerging richness of colour, tonality, and texture. In a renewed but also for Steinman a typical manner, the simplicity of what we see discloses nothing less than creativity in action, the mute but startling negotiation of inner and outer environments, of the personal and cultural past and present.

Cheetham, Mark. A., Reconfigurations: Creative Continuity in: Reconfigurations, Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto, 2013.

1. Adrian Stokes, Inside Out: An Essay in the Psychology and Aesthetic Appeal of Space (1947). In England and its aesthetes: biography and taste / John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Adrian Stokes, essays; commentary, David Carrier. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1997. 95.

Born in Montreal in 1950, Steinman is a product of its passionately divided and dynamic culture. Fluently bilingual, she has a degree in literature from McGill University. Apart from a formative period as a video artist in Vancouver in the late 1970s, she has chosen to stay in Montreal. “I use the city like a laboratory — its chemistry informs my work,” she has said. As an artist, she is noted for her empathy with the dispossessed and for her heightened awareness of the vicissitudes of history and chance.

Steinman has not been afraid to address injustice, whether on her own doorstep or around the world. The brilliant photo-based work Day and Night (1989), created for the “Canadian Biennial of Contemporary Art” at the National Gallery of Canada, was in part a response to the people sleeping on the street whom she observed from the window of her Montreal studio. She spoke to the larger tragedy of loss of homeland — what the exiled Iranian poet Reza Baraheni has described as “the non-place of exile century” — in Borrowed Scenery (1988). The sole Canadian work represented in “Aperto ‘88” at the Venice Biennale, it was also shown at the 1988 Calgary Olympics.

Aesthetically, her sensibility has always been polished and elegant, in apparent contradiction to disturbing content. Even when political correctness was at its peak in the early 1990s, Steinman refused to toe the line, eschewing the then-fashionable puritanical aesthetic as a form of repression. The fact that the four posed homeless figures in Day and Night possess a classic nobility (Michelangelo's tomb sculptures for Guiliano de Medici were an inspiration) bothered some observers. Steinman's response was that formal beauty can provide an unexpected point of access — increasing the odds that we might open to subject matter which, as conventionally represented, we tend to block. Art critic Reesa Greenberg described the impact of Day and Night: “Truly seeing allows us to ask ourselves questions we avoid when encountering the homeless on the streets.” Yet thankfully, Steinman does not preach, steering clear of didacticism in favour of imaginative connection.

A risk-taker, she has always welcomed new forms of artistic expression. Steinman was a pioneer in extending video beyond specialized screening rooms and into the broader realm of private and public art galleries. She made the leap by incorporating video into increasingly ambitious sculptural installations which might include text, sound, projections, still photography and traditional materials. The process began with the 1980 work, Le Couple Dormant, a double bed with two video monitors inset in the pillows like a sleeping twosome — one “dreaming” in a colour tape and the other registering brain waves in black and white. In Cenotaph (1985), a video monitor concealed within the pyramidal monument created an illusion of an “eternal flame” flickering in its crown.

This celebrated work — whose triangular granite base is inscribed on three sides with an excerpt from a text from Hannah Arendt's Totalitarianism: “The radicalism of measures to treat people as if they had never existed and to make them disappear is frequently not apparent at first glance” — was a memorial to those victims of historical atrocities whose bodies were never found. Steinman created the work for a contemporary art centre in Lyon, France, at a time when Klaus Barbie, former head of the Gestapo in Lyon, was awaiting trial there. The work was also shown at the 1987 São Paulo Bienal where it recalled for many viewers the crimes of certain South American military regimes against their peoples. Curator and critic Bruce Ferguson described its “portable” effect: “The suffocating drama of extermination which underlies and supports authoritative history is undermined by this special object which, phoenix-like, returns to burn again into consciousness.”

Signs (1992), created for the inaugural exhibition of the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, was yet another piece which travelled well. Steinman covered a wall in the museum with 60 red electric signs, of the type normally bearing the word “EXIT” or “SORTIE.” Now reading “SILENCE,” they flashed on and off in random sequence, starting small and building to a crescendo. Created as a witty yet sinister response to Quebec's language laws, particularly those forbidding outdoor signs in English, Signs went on to accrue a deeper significance. Exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New York a year later, however, Signs was also able to evoke the broader suppression of freedoms, and even to function as a memorial wall. The critic Kay Larson praised its eloquence in New York magazine: “…the act of silencing one voice begets others until the wall smokes with red.”

Steinman's formal inventiveness, conceptual richness and oft-lauded ability to respond sensitively to both site and curatorial program has made her a regular on the national and international exhibition circuit. In 1990, she created the video installation, Icon, for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1991, her installation Ballroom was one of the highlights of Mary Jane Jacob's “Places with a Past,” a groundbreaking exhibition of site-specific historical interrogations in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1995, she was one of 13 invited to participate in “Notion of Conflict,” an exhibition of Canadian art organized by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam as part of official celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Her Atlantis Improv was a haunting, poetic installation of caged books and hanging violins. Accompanied by a daily performance by a street violinist, it spoke to the endurance of art in the face of official repression. The title was a reference to The Emperor of Atlantis, an opera composed in Theresienstadt by Victor Ullman, an inmate of the concentration camp who did not survive to see it performed. Steinman has cited the resilient creativity of the artists, musicians and writers at Theresienstadt as an inspiration to her as an artist.

A streamlining of formal elements and a new symbolic expansiveness can be seen in the chandelier sculpture, Lux (2000). Originally conceived for an exhibition in Prague, in the Czech Republic, where Bohemian crystal is made, Lux was shown for the first time at La Biennale de Montréal in the exhibition “Tout le temps/Every Time,” curated by Peggy Gale. In this stunning work, eventually acquired by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the skeleton of a chandelier in raw steel chain is suspended above a mandala-like circle of crystals on the floor beneath. Dramatic lighting in a darkened room accentuates the sparkling crystals and casts net-like shadows on the floor around them. “To me, it's as if the chandelier had shed its skin, revealing the toughness beneath the façade of beauty,” Steinman has written. “Originally, I had in mind all the historical layering of different regimes that had invaded and dominated Prague, and the chandelier became for me an icon of resistance and of that very delicate balance between strength and fragility.”

In Lux, it is art itself which sheds light. The same can be said for the luminous series of digital photographs which Steinman began in 1997. As she did with video, she embraced the potential of a relatively new art form to produce works of remarkable grace and profundity. Digital photography is a computer technology which allows the often surreal montaging of images from diverse sources into a seamless hybrid. It permits Steinman to compress a wealth of references, vantage points and time frames within a single photograph.

Only in the digital photographs does the natural world first begin to figure as a significant element. In Grace-note (1997), we encounter from top to bottom: an evening sky, waves at sea, a glassy curtain of ice, a shroud or ceremonial robe set in a quiet, cave-like enclosure. Here we seem to confront the primal fear of death itself, crystallized in an imaginative space which allows for reflection.

And, of course, nature plays a part in outdoor sculpture and landscape design — another field in which Steinman has recently become a player. The small contemplative havens she has designed in downtown Vancouver and Toronto explore the redemptive potential of nature and of art.

The passage of time is a strong recurrent theme. As the artist has said of the digital photographs, “…there is the notion of a deep past and a suggested future within them which I think I aim for in all the works.” Double Blind (1997) is a dual portrait of a man and woman behind shattered glass, which implies a narrative of rupture, anguish and uncertainty. The exquisite sculpture, Houdini's Case (1999), a glass hammer and glass nails encased in a glass cabinet, speaks to what Steinman describes as the “futility of escapism.” She has often used glass — etched, faceted, sculpted or shattered — in ways which suggest our terrifying vulnerability to time and to fate.

A high-noon confrontation with fear in all its manifestations — from the personal to the political to the existential — such is the experience of Steinman's art. For all its formal beauty, her work is never complacent. Adventurous, probing, courageous and lyrical, it connects us to the present moment so that we may better know ourselves and one another.

MacKay, Gillian. Reflective Spaces: The Art of Barbara Steinman in: The Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts 2002, Canada Council for the Arts, Ottawa, 2002.