DREAM MACHINE (try walking on a path of splinters with no shoes)
W Projects
Vancouver, BC
September 30 – November 18, 2023
By Lauren Lavery
The other day, as I was browsing through unreasonably high prices for olive oil at the grocery store, a woman standing nearby exclaimed, “Why are grocery prices so expensive?!” This moment verbalized my internal thoughts and further solidified the main source of my recent anxieties—money.
Maybe the question I really want to ask is, who doesn’t think about money these days? Amongst the plethora of many things that I think and worry about—a ceasefire in Palestine, climate catastrophe, what I’m going to make for dinner—money consistently floats to the top. In this post-capitalist, consumer-oriented society, we are living at a point in human history that is constantly bombarded with billions of ways in which we should spend money. Despite the increasing cleverness of targeted advertising and AI-curated mood boards, I am personally finding myself more and more alienated from consumption culture at large, but instead more obsessed with the concept of “having” money. How life-changing would having a large sum of money be? What amazing things could I achieve and experience with said money? What about the confidence and peace I could achieve in knowing I could support my friends and family for the foreseeable future? In its essence, these are all questions that make the concept of the lottery so indisputably irresistible.
In Russna Kaur’s solo exhibition DREAM MACHINE (try walking on a path of splinters with no shoes) at W Projects in Vancouver, her distinguishable brightly-coloured abstract paintings are not hung against bare white walls, but on a sea of old lottery tickets. The walls of the entire gallery have been painstakingly wallpapered with (a small portion) of her father’s collection of lottery tickets. Since he immigrated to Canada from India in the 1980s and learned about the prospect of the lottery, he has made a daily ritual of purchasing a ticket. Additionally, his practice includes the dutiful saving and notation of each one, which he stores in dated and numbered plastic bags in suitcases in the basement of their family home in Brampton, Ontario.
In my conversation with Kaur at the gallery, she revealed this information with a sigh and shake of her head, adding that her whole family is perplexed by his lifelong fascination. However unconventional this habit may seem, the accumulated mass of tickets and their physical presence in actual space makes real society’s collective obsession with aspiring to instantaneous wealth. It’s the ultimate dream of any immigrant or underdog story, to strike it rich despite the impossible odds stacked against you.
The collage of lotto tickets spans approximately ten to fifteen years as you move around the gallery, and through this time travel the colour and aesthetic design of the tickets also transform. Beginning in a white base with light green accents, then transitioning through a period of orange in the late ‘90s, and finally returning to the green and yellow scheme, the tickets ebb and flow on your eyes like a wave lapping the shore. But if that description is too cliché, how the subtle gradients of the tickets both collide and integrate themselves with the vibrating lines of Kaur’s paintings was thrilling.
The artist often works on separate panels that are then placed together for installation, resulting in the thickly layered lines either connecting or terminating at the divide. Brightly coloured abstraction can come off as superficial, however, Kaur skillfully defies easy interpretation with the constantly surprising tactility of her surfaces, mixing paint with sand, sawdust, and cut canvas, or through incorporating letters of the alphabet. When compounded with her distinctive bright, often neon colour palette, the textures transform into a kind of alien landscape, pushing the abstraction into otherworldly dimensions.
Viewing Kaur’s work is always a pleasure, but it is in this in-person experience where the details truly sing. Against the backdrop of what feels like a thousand tickets, suddenly the weight of her experience growing up as the oldest daughter in a Punjabi family comes into play. Is it any wonder that Kaur’s father dreamed of the impossible of supporting his family through the luck of the lotto? It’s through this generous and intimate gesture of the tickets that the artist provides the viewer insight into both the eternal optimism and desperation of yearning for a better life.
Now that the show is down, the allure of the lottery continues its physically tempting presence to us in the usual ways. Long lineups of people waiting for their turn at the BC Lottery kiosk in the mall snakes around a set of stanchions, not unlike the thick brushstrokes of Kaur’s paintings. As I walk towards the exit with my expensive bag of groceries, I think about Kaur’s father’s daily ritual that inspires his undying faith and optimism despite the hurdles he has endured throughout his life. If he does finally win one day, maybe that proves that dreams do come true. However naive it may be, I’d also like to believe that this world exists, a humbling reminder to keep pursuing and creating the reality I want for myself and the world. One in which we aren’t always thinking about money would be a nice start.