Rachel Lauren Kaster | Anamnesis, Solo Exhibition

"First, we want to be seen, but once we're seen, that is not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.” ~ Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (2014)

The Los Angeles Art Association/Gallery 825 (LAAA) presents Anamnesis a solo show by artist Rachel Lauren Kaster. The exhibition will be on view October 20, 2018 to November 30, 2018 at the Los Angeles Art Association/Gallery 825. This is Kaster’s second solo show at LAAA.

In her solo exhibition, Kaster is constructing an installation of suspended pendants, image transparencies, small photographs/snapshots, and heirlooms in a kind of charm bracelet-fetish necklace cum chandelier—a web of memory and projection—that will fill an entire gallery. Among these fragile objects, the viewer will also see suspended hard drives, thumb drives and defragmented images—evidencing our changing and ever more unstable and impermanent connections to these memories. The room will shimmer with light and shadow with the flickering images of the transparencies moving across the walls. “Oh, the stories they could tell,” Kaster once said of her doll ‘charm bracelets’. Here, Kaster projects a contained universe of stories and fragments of stories that shift in the tremulous shadows, sharpening one moment in crystalline projections and blurring into the stuff of recast or faded memories. 

Kaster talks about her fascination with charm bracelets. “A couple years ago I was forced to clean out a cabinet and was confronted with family china and knick-knacks that were in no way useful objects, and yet I was unable to part with them. I felt like I was throwing away my family’s history. The objects have no real value, but their emotional weight had me wrap them up and put them back in boxes. As I was wrestling with the paradox of these useless/priceless objects the charm bracelet concept began to take shape.”

Kaster explores our changing relationship to memory, and more specifically emotional attachments. From her fascination with tools in their various stages of use and abandonment or desuetude, Kaster moved on to the non-utilitarian domain of dolls, children’s toys, domestic décor accessories and the trinkets that might be found on charm bracelets. Instead of what might once have been a more conventionally presented bas relief, Kaster fashioned her bricolage into the supersized simulacra of actual charm bracelets.