News of the World

Newspaper, Hair, 2011, 13 x 19 in

Barbara Astman takes time to read the newspaper every morning. She enjoys the experience of coming upon information about the world that she would not instinctually seek out. The ritual of reading the paper, flipping through each page, and reading about diverse events and cultural critiques reminds her that she exists in a larger world.

The Newspaper Series deals with a fascination veering towards obsession with mass media communication and its influence on reality, memory and history. Seen from a distance, the individual strips resemble strips of human DNA. On closer examination, Astman has deliberately chosen to highlight, through the folding and marking of certain pages, stories of tragedy, celebrity scandal, political upheaval, fashion trends, triumph and everyday life. The artist notes her images play on our obsession with media and the contradictory aspects of newspapers as vehicles of compromised communication.

The Newspaper Series visually encapsulates the physical processes of sifting through a magnitude of information, and perspective on the significance of media in the formulation of our notions of the world. Astman collected the Newspapers she read for one year. She made 52 unique strips. Conceptually, an installation of seven vertical strips represents a week.