Randy Burman

”Seder as Art was about looking at practices, traditions, symbols, and meanings through non-usual mediums. It involved taking one aspect of the Passover Seder and parsing it down in ways that the most personal, the closest to the artist’s own life and experience and manifesting that through his or her artistic practice. During the 10 Plagues section of the Seder, participants recall the 10 plagues that were imposed on Pharoah and the Egyptians in order to wear Pharoah down enough to agree to set the Israelites free. Seder-doers name each plague and drop a spot of wine for each one. Commonly a finger is dunked in a wine glass to form the drop. Burman took a redemptive route and selected the number “18” popularly representing life in Jewish numerology. The very process of the performative installation piece which invited observers to pick up graphic flyers representing modern day plagues and place them in a paper shreader is completely redemptive as the person shreads the idea, leaving it behind in a Lucite container showcasing its destruction. The plagues squelched in the piece included Reality TV, Addiction To Oil, Guns, Junk Food, Hypocrisy, Inequality, Tyrants and more, featuring appropriated images from the web.”

– Jenni Person