Russna Kaur embraces colour in major new exhibition at Whistler’s Audain Art Museum
The local artist has expanded on smaller works by painting on walls at the gallery
Russna Kaur in the process of a site-based creation for the Audain Art Museum’s upper galleries. Photo by Oisin McHugh
Audain Art Museum presents Russna Kaur: Pierced into the air, the temper and secrets crept in with a cry! from October 4 to January 27, 2025
GROWING UP AS the daughter of a mom who ran an Indian bridal boutique, Russna Kaur was surrounded by colourful textiles during her youth in Brampton, Ontario. Think hot pink, royal blue, rose red, deep purple, sunflower yellow, and bright orange. Powerful colours are now a distinguishing feature of her abstract artwork, which will be featured in a major new exhibition at Whistler’s Audain Art Museum, Russna Kaur: Pierced into the air, the temper and secrets crept in with a cry!.
Having moved to B.C. in 2017, Kaur tells Stir that she remembers watching so many cartoons when she was a child in the 1990s: Arthur, Barney & Friends, Sailor Moon, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles… The list goes on, all of them bursting with bright shades.
“We also took yearly trips to Canada’s Wonderland and so growing up I had all these different experiences with colour,” Kaur says in a phone interview with Stir. “The households that I grew up in—friends and family—were always very colourful. We used to go to our gudwara, or Sikh temple, and I ended up going to a Christian school for junior high and high school so I spent a lot of time in and out of various religious spaces, which are also very colourful. I became fixated on the colour in my life and what it can represent.
“Bright colours evoke feelings of joy,” she continues. “But also through my mom’s bridal boutique I was hearing stories of the women and for sure there’s joy but there’s also a lot of hardship and challenges and unspoken words and regrets and all of these really human feelings. I began to think: ‘What does it mean when we adorn ourselves with so much colour?’ I started to think of bright, bold colours as this armour, something we use to protect ourselves or to deflect from, and I brought that into my practice.”
Consider one of the pieces that makes up the Audain exhibition, They are midway between the sun and the moon, which is part of the museum’s permanent collection. It’s composed of 13 different surfaces—some are canvas, some are wood, others are stretched textiles like silk and cotton, another distinguishing feature of Kaur’s work.
“I really wanted to experiment with different surfaces because part of my journey to painting was when I used to work very closely with my mom in her Indian bridal boutique, and I grew up going to very large Indian weddings; that is very much part of my culture and community,” Kaur says. “I wanted to play with textiles and with textures to create movement. These textiles were much more familiar to me than canvas. That use of colour and line is a really large component of my work.”
Russna Kaur. Photo by Oisin McHugh
Kaur was an artist-in-residence at the Burrard Arts Foundation in 2020, and that same year she earned the Centrum Emerging Artist Residency in Port Townsend, Washington. She has exhibited works nationally at institutions including the Remai Modern in Saskatoon; Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives in Brampton; and Kamloops Art Gallery. Her work is held in numerous collections including the RBC Art Collection, Vancouver Art Gallery, Surrey Art Gallery, and the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art.
For her exhibition at the Audain, Kaur has expanded on several of her works by painting on the walls that make up the museum’s upper gallery. It’s a site-specific format she has experimented with in the past. The show unfolds in the space as a series of modular works, where smaller paintings evolve into large-scale wall compositions. Kaur uses diverse materials, including wood, textiles, acrylic and spray paint, oil pastels, handmade paper, and 3D-printed elements, manipulating surfaces to create a dialogue with the gallery’s acclaimed architecture.
“Painting on the walls is a way of extending the paintings,” Kaur says. “It’s also an opportunity to engage with the architecture, and the architecture of the Audain is so unique and exciting. I see the walls as an extension of my painted surfaces and I like to see how surfaces can grow—the compositions can continue to expand. Larger-scale works are composed of smaller surfaces that come together. The painted extensions offer a lot more movement.”
This site-based exhibition is part of a larger effort by the Audain Art Museum to provide notable emerging and mid-career artists in B.C. with opportunities to stretch their respective practices, notes AAM chief curator Curtis Collins.
He tells Stir that “Kaur has combined a unique painted treatment of the upper galleries’ wall surfaces with a selection of her multi-media works on canvas, silk, organza, and board created over the past five years. Such a show is a visual delight of colour and space for visitors to experience in a bodily manner.”
Kaur didn’t always plan on pursuing a career as an artist. She started out studying biology at the University of Waterloo and had contemplated medicine but switched to fine arts halfway through. As the eldest daughter in a Punjabi household, she says had a tendency to do things for other people and to lose her own voice in the process.
“I wanted to do something for myself, and that’s how I started pursuing painting,” says Kaur, who completed her master’s degree in fine arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. “It’s kind the main way I’m able to express myself.
“Abstraction is almost in a way like an indirect form of communication,” she adds. “There’s no imagery to lock on to but you’re connecting with an experience of colour, texture, surface, and scale. You’re not actually telling anyone what to see or what to look at; for me, abstraction translates to thinking for yourself, and that’s really important to me. Abstraction is a way for me to say something without actually saying it.” 
Related Articles
