Aloma Treister - http://aloma.treister.org
bijant...@gmail.com
http://aloma.treister.org
The great strength in Aloma Treister's art comes from its
inspiration. As Kandinksy pointed out, all art is a product of its
time. Treister's work takes this to an unusual, perhaps unique,
extreme. Born in Baghdad into a Jewish family she moved to Iran in
1948, as a result of political pressures, and stayed there until moving
to Australia in 1973. Born into a Sephardic (Middle Eastern) Jewish
community she lived in a Judaic island in an Islamic society blending
the rich and decorative visual culture of both into her distinctive
visual style.Both Jews and Muslims avoid the representation of the
figure in their art, rather developing an elaborate decorative
framework built around geometry and abstract symbols. Despite
conceptual differences each religion offers a source of decorative
splendor which feeds Treister's imagination and shapes her aesthetic
sensibilities. As she comments:
"Our synagogue was intricately decorated with mosaic mirror tiles in
recognizable local Islamic patterns. Silver platters embossed with
these patterns carried our delicacies. Persian carpets adorned not only
our floors, but also covered our furniture. The finest silk carpets of
Mashhad, rather than prints or paintings, were displayed in prominent
positions on our lounge room walls. They were forms of investment in
art. Their (Moslem) art became our (Jewish) art."
(Master of Arts thesis, Monash University, 2000).
Aesthetic integration and cultural tolerance shaped Treister's
artistic development and was integral to the formation of the
decorative sensitivity and expressive awareness her art now reflects.
It is as if she has carried youthful observations of a society tolerant
of conceptual diversity and visual similarity, to her new home in
Australia; and also curiously, to her art years later at the beginning
of the 21st Century. This may be explained by the environment Australia
provided. While Treister found a strong Jewish community in her new
country, by far the dominant group was Ashkenazi or Jews of Eastern
European origin. So she was, in a sense, more isolated than as a Jew in
a Muslim world; the visual culture of a more culturally empathic period
of her life continues to inspire her art.
In the last decade, Treister has had the courage to confront her
personal history, reawaken the memories of a distant and now
geographically inaccessible past and reconfirm her personal identity.
We all live with the shadows of our history, the features which
individualize our past and directly, or indirectly, shape our present.
These shadows are often obscured by the values and experiences of our
immediate way of life, the daily routine which constitutes our everyday
reality. But Treister has pushed past this immediate world to look
through memory and sift the treasures from her past. Few can claim to
have been born in the cradle of civilization just kilometers from the
ancient Babylon, or to see with the eyes of cultures now locked in
public conflict. It is often evident that creativity thrives in the
context of social discourse or, even conflict and for Treister it is
her visual talent which catalyzed her past and present into a cohesive
whole. Her art reconciles her cultural history into a contemporary
force, establishing a body of paintings relevant and appealing today. A
social dialectic, East and West, Islamic and Jewish, old and new,
public and personal give her images meaning.
There is a final dimension to Treister's art that asserts its
significance, its expressive purpose. All art distils the products of
our sensibilities into objective form, our observations transformed
into sympathetic structures which represent our perceptions; the ideas
and the feelings become tangible. But for Treister this is the key to
her world. The trammeling influence of the past has established its own
identity, a world of depth and feeling in which the emotions of a
diverse and rich life are realised. The peripheral vision of the
outsider, the visitor in a transient existence has crystallized her
focus. Her identity is an emotion, belonging beyond the fractured
journeys of location and time. It is this feeling which gives meaning
both to self and art, a meaning which transcends culture, history and
geographic awareness. It is the emotion which is in harmony with life,
which looks for identity through universality and peace within the ever
present certainty of change. Aloma Treister looks for this emotion in
the decorative images of her own origins, but finds it in the creative
transformations of her personal art.
The collages, the paintings with their computer manipulated photographs
and the mono-prints all derive from Treister's rich decorative
sensibility. They speak, even shout of a search for cultural harmony
which must be read also as a metaphor for personal identity. The even
symmetry of curves and sweeping lines mirror the dancing arabesques of
mosque tiles or the decorative lace of a stone screens which guard a
hidden world from prying eyes. There is the intensity of colour, the
vivid, saturated hues of Persian rugs and block-print fabric, stirring
the winds of memory and fanning the flames of feeling. Perhaps the most
accessible references are from family photographs, scanned and
transformed into repetitive images framed in the matrix of decoration
and bathed in the density of hue; a cousin and her children;
grandparents on their wedding day dressed in the finery of their
traditional attire.
One cannot survey these works with indifference; there is memory,
reflection, curiosity and wonder. Few of us would be as open about who
we are or the emotions which shape our being. These images express the
heart and also the soul of their author, courageous, self aware and
secure in the assertion of herself. This art is strong in its meaning,
rich in its artistic range and secure in its identity.
Professor Bernard Hoffert
Monash University
2004