April 5 marked the first night of Passover. True to Jewish tradition, we lay back in our chairs, sang loudly and drank lots of wine. We reveled in the joy and security that many of us are grateful to have in the present while holding close to us the memory of those who have gone before us. Alaskan-born Jewish artist Kate Laster carves these memories into delicate cut-out papers. Then she dips that paper into the ocean.
“My art is about the people we take with us,” she said Hyperallergic in an interview.
Laster’s earliest memories are of snow floating on water. She grew up moving from place to place in rural Alaska, from the temperate rainforest of Juneau to the wild, treeless wilderness of Utqiaġvik. In a world “dense in imagination”, as she describes it, she learned to carve pieces of wood into small figures while listening to stories and poetry by the fireside. She said she first saw language being used as a “visual aid in the sense that people put time aside and were really either in nature or in a warm space to talk”.
Today, she uses the visual force behind the letters themselves, cutting paper into vibrant collages with fragments of poems. — some collected, some written by her. The paper is carefully patinated like stencils, multiplying its message as it is spray painted over and over again. Then she painstakingly laminates the paper by hand, using “really scruffy bits of tape.” The ritual ends at sunset when Laster immerses his works in the Pacific Ocean. As the paper ripples and floats, she sees the waves, part of a living “primordial soup”.
Laster’s youth in Alaska is proof that the Jewish Diaspora extends far beyond the urban landscape. But for all of us, Jewish practices are deeply connected to the natural world. The festivals begin with the setting sun. “It’s often when I take out my books, at sunset,” Laster said. As the large star sets, Laster lifts the text from the water. And as drops fall from its edges, she uses the cut-out hollow paper as a viewfinder, so the words are sky-filled.
The water lapping on Laster’s cutouts is that of the same body that carried our ancestors as they traveled the world in search of home and security. “The movement is real,” she says. “It’s not about losing a sense of self. It is simply a question of understanding that the situation in which we find ourselves is in full mutation. »
Laster is one of A growing number anti-Zionist American Jews. For those who do not wish to settle in Israel, it is common to elevate and celebrate the beauty of the diaspora. Following the love of the movement, this celebration is also a deep love of the places where we are now. For the Laster, that place is the Bay Area, where the The Mexican and Chicano tradition of paper cutting picado paper is tied to the trees lining the Mission, a historically Latinx neighborhood. Chinese paper cut — 窗花 chuang huā, or “window flowers” – bloom in window panes. Laster seems to have soaked up the art of her new home: The perforated rainbow squares at the top of “Turnover Vulnerability” (2022) slightly echo these Mexican and Chinese traditions.
But the work of this artist is also part of her own ancestry. jewish paper cut is a centuries-old tradition that used to be much more commonplace. It was practiced both by professionals and by amateurs at home, not only for marriage contracts or cetubotbut also for holidays like Shavuot And sukkot. Laster now sees himself as part of the new generation that wears it. Requiring no material other than paper and a sharp edge, she sees the beauty in the accessibility of cut paper.
The belief that everyone has a fundamental right to engage in art and to create is central to Laster’s work, both within and outside of his visual practice. She leads art history classes based on donation suggestions and has worked as a studio assistant in the community arts program at Hospitality House, a free art studio for people who are homeless and at low income. residents of Le Filet. Today, she organizes gallery exhibitions at NIAD Art Centera creative space for artists with disabilities.
The act of spreading justice through art is intrinsic to the techniques that Laster also uses. “Engraving and paper cutting in general is about accessibility, conveying a message, a transmission, going as far as possible,” she said. Laster is also in the tradition of modern Jewish graphic arts: words dancing and shouting diagonally across the page recall the utopian dreams of 1920s Eastern Europe. Kultur-Lige (Culture League) artists like El Lissitzky and Nathan Altman. Today, Laster is accompanied in groundbreaking paper works by artists like the Collective of young rebel anarchist Jewsand impressions of Forestay Rogers-Fettwhose Passover-themed print shows burning American and Israeli flags, declaring, “Nationalism is chametz.” Laster and his peers make as many copies as possible, stick their work on street walls, stick them in windows, post the woodcuts themselves and dump everything on the internet so their messages of liberation can be heard from all over the world. far.
Of course, these messages can be interpreted differently depending on who hears them. “It’s the struggle of sharing, of trying to convey everything you feel to someone else. And knowing that once it’s public, it can be changed, transformed and interpreted,” said Laster noted, “I relish that.”
Laster’s work is also deeply personal, as she mourns the loss of her father during the COVID-19 pandemic. In “Kaddish Reunion” (2021), a self-portrait shows the artist seated at her father’s bedside. The spray-painted shapes blend into each other. The typical text of his pieces is replaced by swirls, stars and leaves. The shadows of these words return in another laminated book. Lovingly cut pieces of paper are laminated next to a plastic bag that says “THANK YOU”. The only full words are on the cover: “I don’t know how to say goodbye.”
Laster’s father was a small thruster pilot. As a child, she studied the dense text and cartoons of in-flight emergency manuals, reproduced today in her brilliant messages of grief, love and hope. Maybe the Haggadah is another type of emergency manual: a guide on how to continue?
At Passover, we remember those who have gone before us and those we have lost. We may never have been slaves in Egypt, but we hold with us those who did not escape bondage in the violence of the Inquisition, the pogroms, the Holocaust (Shoa) and countless other hardships. We taste the bitter herbs of desire and sorrow, but we also wash dry unleavened with sweet wine. And above all, we argue, laugh and tell stories of our survival.
