Russna Kaur
CV
b. 1991, Toronto, ON
Russna Kaur is an artist living and working in Vancouver, Canada. She holds a MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2019) and a BA (Honours) with a studio specialization from the University of Waterloo (2013).
Kaur explores how the surface of a painting can reveal a narrative that addresses complex personal and cultural histories. Her large-scale and multi-surface paintings are developed through rigorous explorations of color, text, digital sketches, and mixed media.
Selected exhibitions include “Holding a line in your hand” at Kamloops Art Gallery (2021); “Keep for Old Memoirs” at Young Space Spring 2020 Online, curated with Celine Mo of VICTORI+MO Gallery in New York, NY (2020); “Leaning Out of Windows” at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2020); “the heart is the origin of your worldview” at Art Toronto with Cooper Cole (2019); “Veil of tears” at Trapp Projects, Vancouver (2019) and “She was there for a while…” Fort Gallery, Langley (2019). In 2021, she was commissioned to create an artwork for the second instalment of the Boren Banner Series, public art initiative at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle.
Kaur is the recipient of the Takao Tanabe Painting Prize (2020) for emerging painters in British Columbia and the IDEA Art Award (2020). She was awarded the Gathie Falk Visual Arts Scholarship (2019), the University Women's Club of Vancouver Graduate Scholarship (2017), an Audain Faculty of Art Graduate Teaching Fellowship (2018) and was shortlisted for the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Canada Graduate Scholarship (2018). She has been an artist-in-residence at the Burrard Arts Foundation (2020) in Vancouver which concluded in a solo exhibition, “Suddenly her lips sharpened – it was splendid”. Kaur received the Centrum Emerging Artist Residency (2020) in Port Townsend, Washington.
Her work is a part of several collections including the Audain Art Museum and the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Her work was included in a past group exhibition HIGH ANXIETY curated by Mina Totino.
b. 1991, Toronto, ON
Russna Kaur is an artist living and working in Vancouver, Canada. She holds a MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2019) and a BA (Honours) with a studio specialization from the University of Waterloo (2013).
Kaur explores how the surface of a painting can reveal a narrative that addresses complex personal and cultural histories. Her large-scale and multi-surface paintings are developed through rigorous explorations of color, text, digital sketches, and mixed media.
Selected exhibitions include “Holding a line in your hand” at Kamloops Art Gallery (2021); “Keep for Old Memoirs” at Young Space Spring 2020 Online, curated with Celine Mo of VICTORI+MO Gallery in New York, NY (2020); “Leaning Out of Windows” at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2020); “the heart is the origin of your worldview” at Art Toronto with Cooper Cole (2019); “Veil of tears” at Trapp Projects, Vancouver (2019) and “She was there for a while…” Fort Gallery, Langley (2019). In 2021, she was commissioned to create an artwork for the second instalment of the Boren Banner Series, public art initiative at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle.
Kaur is the recipient of the Takao Tanabe Painting Prize (2020) for emerging painters in British Columbia and the IDEA Art Award (2020). She was awarded the Gathie Falk Visual Arts Scholarship (2019), the University Women's Club of Vancouver Graduate Scholarship (2017), an Audain Faculty of Art Graduate Teaching Fellowship (2018) and was shortlisted for the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Canada Graduate Scholarship (2018). She has been an artist-in-residence at the Burrard Arts Foundation (2020) in Vancouver which concluded in a solo exhibition, “Suddenly her lips sharpened – it was splendid”. Kaur received the Centrum Emerging Artist Residency (2020) in Port Townsend, Washington.
Her work is a part of several collections including the Audain Art Museum and the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Her work was included in a past group exhibition HIGH ANXIETY curated by Mina Totino.
Past exhibition at MRG
"High Anxiety" curated by Mina Totino
High anxiety. Our default setting for the last 18 months. So many uncertainties around health, livelihood, and social codes. As a friend observed, she has felt it all so keenly that words fail her. The exhibition’s title is an expression of our collective state of mind. How better for artists to express themselves (and to a degree the mindset of their viewers) in this uncertain period, and in life, than through their work? Mina Totino, this exhibition’s curator has assembled six artists who have explored this state of anxiety, either recently or pre-Covid, in a way, pulling a thread in a garment of clothing until it unravels or picking at a scab until the fresh skin below becomes visible.
Totino has had a long-standing relationship with all but one of the artists here. She and Jan Wade were employees at a coffee bar together ain the 1980s. She has been friends with Myfanwy MacLeod for many decades: recently, MacLeod has used Totino’s studio to continue her ceramic work, a new direction in her practice. Totino has long shared her ceramic studio and kiln with Nicole Ondre, exhibiting with her in The Eyes Have Walls, an exhibition at the West Vancouver Art Museum in 2020. She has known Philippe Raphanel for many years, an admirer of his highly precise paintings. She knows the production of her partner, Stan Douglas, intimately, observing the development of his projects since they met in art school. In other words, her ties to each of these artists have been strengthened by age and life. Russna Kaur is the one artist with whom she has become recently acquainted, woven into this mix because of her sympathetic approach to Totino's own attitudes towards painting.
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Tex by Hilary Letwin
Totino has had a long-standing relationship with all but one of the artists here. She and Jan Wade were employees at a coffee bar together ain the 1980s. She has been friends with Myfanwy MacLeod for many decades: recently, MacLeod has used Totino’s studio to continue her ceramic work, a new direction in her practice. Totino has long shared her ceramic studio and kiln with Nicole Ondre, exhibiting with her in The Eyes Have Walls, an exhibition at the West Vancouver Art Museum in 2020. She has known Philippe Raphanel for many years, an admirer of his highly precise paintings. She knows the production of her partner, Stan Douglas, intimately, observing the development of his projects since they met in art school. In other words, her ties to each of these artists have been strengthened by age and life. Russna Kaur is the one artist with whom she has become recently acquainted, woven into this mix because of her sympathetic approach to Totino's own attitudes towards painting.
continue reading here
Tex by Hilary Letwin
Installation view "High Anxiety" image credit: Rachel Topham Photography 2021
"We can only hint at this with words"
Group show with Andrea Taylor, M.E. Sparks and Russna Kaur | curated by Kate Henderson
Gordon Smith Foundation | April 23 - June 25, 2022
There is a slowness that happens in the body when we can’t quite name what we’re looking at. Openness and vulnerability arrive via the experience of looking without speaking, and the phrase “We can only hint at this with words” suggests that a feeling, a moment, or an experience is yearning to be named. But the exhibition’s title also points to the inadequacies of language. Our bodies hold memory, story, and trauma, and words often fail to convey the fleshy, corporeal narrative that defines a life. That is to say, words can only hint at what lies beneath the surface. Through multisurfaced experiential painting, sculpture, installation, and animation, Russna Kaur, M.E. Sparks, and Andrea Taylor aim to fill in the blanks where words cannot describe the myriad personal, historical, and cultural encounters and occurrences that make up the human experience.
All three artists share an approach to surface and material, and through their work each explores the limits and possibilities of their respective mediums. In what ways can an image be extended, pulled apart, unhinged from its borders, set free? How can mediums with predetermined uses become malleable and unfixed? In what ways are these material concerns a metaphor for how we move through the world as humans—particularly as women? We can only hint at this with words attempts to answer these questions through the wordless language of materials and the traces of unseen gestures. The exhibited works resist the boundaries of wall and plinth—they creep, fold, and drape throughout the gallery, becoming unfixed, modular, and ever evolving. The surface of each artwork becomes a skin that tells a story. In this way, these mixed-media objects become living, breathing bodies in the room—entities that we, as viewers, can engage in wordless conversation with.
These extraverbal conversations reveal both the personal and sociohistorical complexities brewing beneath the skin of each work. The artists cull from childhood narratives, cultural traditions, and art historical legacies to create new meanings, thereby inserting their own presences into the folds of history. Through the artists’ processes of quoting, redacting, and revising histories—both personal and political—they subvert heteronormative, patriarchal legacies, proposing alternative narratives that pull apart and reject problematic and oppressive histories that have become bound to the female body. The exhibition opens up into other wordless worlds that speak to experiential and radical lines of questioning, bodily freedom, care, and rebellion.
continue reading here
All three artists share an approach to surface and material, and through their work each explores the limits and possibilities of their respective mediums. In what ways can an image be extended, pulled apart, unhinged from its borders, set free? How can mediums with predetermined uses become malleable and unfixed? In what ways are these material concerns a metaphor for how we move through the world as humans—particularly as women? We can only hint at this with words attempts to answer these questions through the wordless language of materials and the traces of unseen gestures. The exhibited works resist the boundaries of wall and plinth—they creep, fold, and drape throughout the gallery, becoming unfixed, modular, and ever evolving. The surface of each artwork becomes a skin that tells a story. In this way, these mixed-media objects become living, breathing bodies in the room—entities that we, as viewers, can engage in wordless conversation with.
These extraverbal conversations reveal both the personal and sociohistorical complexities brewing beneath the skin of each work. The artists cull from childhood narratives, cultural traditions, and art historical legacies to create new meanings, thereby inserting their own presences into the folds of history. Through the artists’ processes of quoting, redacting, and revising histories—both personal and political—they subvert heteronormative, patriarchal legacies, proposing alternative narratives that pull apart and reject problematic and oppressive histories that have become bound to the female body. The exhibition opens up into other wordless worlds that speak to experiential and radical lines of questioning, bodily freedom, care, and rebellion.
continue reading here