Russna Kaur: Pierced into the air, the temper and secrets crept in with a cry!
Audain Art Museum, Whistler, BC - To Jan 27, 2025
Born in Brampton, Ontario, in 1991, Russna Kaur took a path to visual art practice that included post secondary stops in biology, clothing design, and surface and textile design centred on architectural space. In a recent Vancouver Art Gallery interview, Kaur spoke of working with her mother, who ran an Indian fashion business from home, where she was exposed to “different textiles, and combing textiles to create movement and texture.” Eventually Kaur formalized her studies at the University of Waterloo (BA, 2013) and Emily Carr University of Art + Design (MFA, 2019).
“My practice is primarily in painting, though I use a wide range of materials in my work. Typically, my larger-scale works come together like a puzzle, so I paint on a variety of smaller surfaces that piece together to create these larger-scale compositions.… I also work mainly in abstraction, and that’s something that’s really important to me as a person and as an artist. For me, abstraction quite literally translates to thinking for yourself, and that’s not always something that I felt like I had the opportunity to do.”
Kaur’s current exhibition presents work that challenges the ostensible neutrality of the gallery wall, questioning the line between the autonomous art object and its institutional support. That she does so with bright colours that extend beyond the canvas makes this questioning less an interrogation than something joyous, a liberation. “Oftentimes I think I feel through line, or I experience life through line,” says Kaur near the end of her interview. Whether that’s the path you take, the line you make, or the one you break, Russna Kaur is on it.
