Crow’s Field was the name Kaur and her childhood friends gave an unclaimed strip of farmland where she grew up in rural New England. During games this nameless acreage between the forest and the road became a magical no-man‘s-land, transforming into a metaphorical space where the imaginary and the real collide.
Purposely engaging with versions of the photographic genres of still life, landscape, and portraiture allow the artist to access memories of Crow’s Field. This remembered place is impossible to document since it no longer exists except in memory, so Kaur photographs it by making fragmented atmospheric images that recall her idea of the uncanny utopia. Her pictures de-center the classic narrative structure through subtle dislocations of time and space, leaving out clues that would complete the narrative as a whole and inviting the viewer to participate in finishing the story.
Invaded throughout by everyday natural elements that are almost too strange to believe, Kaur creates an otherworldy stream-of-consciousness meditation on memory in photographs- a freshly caught octopus becomes a pagan still life; a girl and her dog morph into a chimera at rest; a sunflower transforms into a baroque abstraction. Upon closer examination, a touch of menace often underlies the most familiar and genteel exteriors. Kaur seizes on the corroding sense of uneasiness that gnaws at her most cherished attachments. It’s not that she can’t go home again; it’s that home was never exactly what she thought it was.