Kour Pour UK, b. 1987

The intimate scale of this carpet painting by Los Angeles-based artist Kour Pour is meant to evoke a once-iconic consumer product of the digital age: a computer mouse pad. Pour is renowned for his ongoing series of ambitious, large-scale Persian carpet paintings, which evoke his Iranian heritage and address the intercultural fostering of images, materials, and techniques across time and space by blending iconography from throughout Asia and Europe. Years ago, when Pour first started making carpet paintings, people would sometimes bring him gifts of mouse pads printed with carpet designs on them. He recalls how funny it was to see these little digitally printed carpet images sourced from pictures on the internet that were scanned from books. The process itself felt so interconnected with the cultural transfer of images and ideas that Pour himself was thinking about in the studio. These little carpet mouse pads also rolled up and could be taken from place to place, just like carpets. For this new series, Pour is revisiting this memory, creating small-scale carpet paintings that are the same size as mouse pads, but that are made using the complex technique that he employs for his large-scale carpet paintings. He first researches source images in search of an iconic Persian carpet design dating back centuries, with deep intercultural legacies. He then photographs the design and makes modifications to that image before burning the new image onto a screen to later transfer onto the surface of his painting. Before he makes the transfer, he prepares the surface with multiple interlocking layers of gesso, applied vertically and then horizontally with a broom or brush, creating a surface reminiscent of the woven pattern that would be found on a traditional carpet. The screenprint is then transferred to the surface, after which Pour takes turns sanding it and hand painting over it, alternately adding and erasing sections of the image. The erasure and additions echo the nature of intercultural transform and re-writing of history inherent in the visual language of Persian carpets, while the precious scale and mobility of these small carpet paintings carry the same sentiment as a carpet—a movable object that you can carry with you on a journey and unpack at your new destination as a visual and material marker of home.