Kate Laster: Mourning Pages @ The Fourth Wall
The Fourth Wall is pleased to present artist and cultural worker Kate Laster's first solo show in the Bay Area. MOURNING PAGES is an exhibition of her new papercut bookforms, nonlinear poetry and memorial images. The surface that Laster cuts through is often bright and vivid, saturated by aerosol spray and touching upon how the personal, the political and the gravity of loss are interconnected. These papercuts resemble kites, bookforms, viewfinders and protest banners.
Laster makes diaristic work about and through the medium of text, with a consideration towards the tangled web of language found in the internet, ritual and grief. Honoring the punk legacy of quick and fast graffiti stencils, as well as the traditions of papel picado and Chinese papercut that are prolific in the Bay Area, she makes unorthodox letterforms while drawing with a blade. As a dyslexic writer, they find meaning creating love letters to reading that slow down spelling into a visual process.
MOURNING PAGES is about negative space, the crater that absence leaves, and the people who are no longer with us, yet etched in our ways of thinking. This exhibition connects art ancestors, survivors, witnesses and stenographers, it explores the endurance of grief and the elastic capacity of people. Laster’s late father, a teacher and collector of quotations, often said “When you get there, there you are.”
About the Artist:
Kate Laster (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker from Anchorage, Alaska (Dena'ina land) now based in Oakland (Ohlone land). Laster looks at the intersection of disability, economic justice and collective care. Their papercut practice connects graffiti stencils with painting and printmaking to make unique bookforms and agitprop multiples. Laster received a BA at Evergreen State College in 2015 and in 2019 she received a MA+MFA in History & Theory of Contemporary Art and Studio Art with an emphasis in Printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute. Laster's artwork has been shown in Japan, Korea, Canada and Germany as well as at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum in Santa Barbara and the Tenderloin Museum in San Francisco. They have been an artist-in-residence at many programs in California such as: InCahoots, Kala Art Institute, Chalk Hill, Open Windows Cooperative as well as Vermont Studio Center, Cisco Home of the Brave in Utah, and Pillow Fort Art Center in New York. Her artwork and organizing has been featured in Hyperallergic, Hey Alma and KQED. Laster’s artist books are represented by Booklyn.