Kaur’s paintings rigorously explore colour and form, investigating the materiality of the medium by playing with textures and surfaces. DREAM MACHINE (try walking on a path of splinters with no shoes) comprises several new paintings, a site-specific wall painting, as well as a monumental installation created from lotto tickets.

By combining colours, textures and panels, Kaur’s paintings marry multiple ideas and histories. Through her practice she raises questions around how abstract paintings can, sometimes inadvertently, reveal personal, family, and cultural histories.

On the layered, symbolic nature of Kaur’s mark-making, Renée van der Avoird writes “She thinks about transitions from one line to the next: intersections, interruptions, dead ends. She employs lines that are seamless, dotted, implied, segmented. She looks at lines as markers of relationships in her life: some weaken while others get stronger...complex networks of lines may represent complicated relationships. The paintings take on a sense of psychogeography: labyrinthine maps of lived experience, tied together by family, friends and community across time and space.”

Sitting with several of her paintings is her monumental site-specific installation, composed of lotto tickets that her father has played and collected every day since he immigrated to Canada from India in the late 1980s. A potent symbol of hope and optimism, the lotto offered him an opportunity that was blind to race and prejudice. In retaining every single ticket, he has played since his arrival in Canada, he has created a diary of sorts, documenting both his positivity and the intense pressure he felt to provide and succeed financially. In repurposing these tickets and displaying them on the gallery walls, Kaur creates an all- encompassing, overwhelming abstraction powerfully embedded with her family history.