Ajay Kurian: Missing Home

About

His sculptures and installations concentrate the shifty mechanisms of denial, such as assimilation, generational trauma, and dislocation, that underwrite contemporary diasporic experience. Suspended above a bed of fallen pine needles spanning 47 Canal’s gallery floor, the new sculptures that comprise Kurian’s “Missing Home,” began as daubs of paint—pressed, then smeared out according to the spill made by their own reflection. These impressions are outlined and translated onto sheets of foam-core, their extremities scored and curled into threedimensions and then fortified with plaster and fiberglass. Paint is applied to imply a vibratory derma, with irradiating pleats of color—peacock, seafoam, tamarind—that vie, as opposing desires do, for the primacy of your attention.