There is a hushed power in Jane Bastion’s new exhibition, Silhouettes of Life, currently on view at the Easton Rooms, a show composed entirely of silhouette portraits. At first glance, it may seem a modest proposal: profiles in bold colors cut sharply against pale grounds, an 18th-century form revived with restraint. But to spend time with Bastion’s work is to experience a quiet drama unfold—one that explores identity, intimacy, and memory through what is left unseen.
The opening night was unusually subdued for a private view, the usual rush of art-scene chatter replaced by a slower, more contemplative pace. Visitors moved along the walls in near silence, pausing, doubling back, squinting slightly, as if attempting to read the portraits not just as likenesses but as ciphers. The works do not shout. They wait.
Each silhouette, rendered with a delicacy that belies its apparent simplicity, becomes a study in presence and absence. Bastion has modernised the form with digital interventions and colour. She stays close to the tradition but pushes at its edges. A few portraits include slight deviations—a loosened strand of hair, a tilted hat brim, a shoulder slightly turned. In these subtle shifts, whole personalities emerge. A child’s profile, its line wavering with a hint of restlessness, sits beside the stern geometry of an older man whose high collar and straight spine suggest formality—or perhaps fear.
The genius of the exhibition lies in its refusal to explain. None of the works are titled with names. Instead, the pieces carry dates, locations, or phrases: April, West Window, Three Years After, She Didn’t Speak That Day. These fragments lend the works a narrative texture, encouraging the viewer to fill the void between what is given and what is implied.
This is not nostalgia, though there is an echo of the past in Bastion’s method. Rather, it is something more searching: a meditation on how we remember people, and how much we can ever truly know of them. The silhouettes ask not just “Who is this?” but “What remains of a person when all detail is stripped away?”
It is telling that several visitors returned to the same portraits more than once during the evening, drawn back to the suggestive emptiness of each shape. The lack of facial expression, of decorative context becomes its own form of invitation—to imagine, to remember, to project.
Bastion, whose previous works leaned more heavily into figuration and soft realism, has here committed to a discipline that might seem restrictive. Yet in that limitation she has found something expansive. Silhouettes of Life is a moving and, at times, unsettling exhibition that asks much of its viewer—not in terms of interpretation, but in attention. It rewards slowness.
There is a reason silhouettes once carried the weight of portraiture before photography. They offer not likeness, but presence. Bastion understands this deeply, and in this poised, meticulously constructed show, she gives us a gallery full of lives not captured, but traced—and in the tracing, remembered.