Jennifer Small

Time Takes a Cigarette

2017

Karine Payette builds vast dreamlike settings from hyperrealistic, banal objects in order to produce something narrative that evokes the precariousness of the world. The artist plays...

Nicholas Crombach is interested in the complex interactions between humans and animals. Using sporting and hunting as markers of longstanding traditions of both adversarial and collaborative relationships between humans and animals, Crombach examines the cultural significance and the complex issues percolating domestication and domination, play and survival in the 21st century. Crombach combines references to mythology via a striking aesthetic, creating works which revel in their contradictions and contrasts. Notably, the artist draws from the myth of Diana and Actaeon, which provides a poignant framework for this new series. In Ovid’s tale Actaeon, a hunter and grandson of King Cadmus, is in the forest with his dogs when he spies Artemis (Diana), the venerated goddess of the hunt, in her bath attended by her nymphs. Diana’s nymphs try to cover her modesty as the goddess feels violated by Actaoen’s brash curiosity. Diana splashes water upon Actaeon, robbing him from his ability to speak and turning him from a mortal man into a stag who flees into the forest only to be hunted down and killed by his own dogs. The hunter becomes the hunted. Crombach’s Fetch (2018) refers to the mythology of Diana and Actaeon in its last tragic hour, but the classical story of metamorphoses is presented as a game of fetch in the local park. Crombach creates a hybrid between the art historical imagery from paintings of hounds...

Nicholas Crombach is interested in the complex interactions between humans and animals. Using sporting and hunting as markers of longstanding traditions of both adversarial and collaborative relationships between humans and animals, Crombach examines the cultural significance and the complex issues percolating domestication and domination, play and survival in the 21st century. Crombach combines references to mythology via a striking aesthetic, creating works which revel in their contradictions and contrasts. Notably, the artist draws from the myth of Diana and Actaeon, which provides a poignant framework for this new series. In Ovid’s tale Actaeon, a hunter and grandson of King Cadmus, is in the forest with his dogs when he spies Artemis (Diana), the venerated goddess of the hunt, in her bath attended by her nymphs. Diana’s nymphs try to cover her modesty as the goddess feels violated by Actaoen’s brash curiosity. Diana splashes water upon Actaeon, robbing him from his ability to speak and turning him from a mortal man into a stag who flees into the forest only to be hunted down and killed by his own dogs. The hunter becomes the hunted. Crombach’s Fetch (2018) refers to the mythology of Diana and Actaeon in its last tragic hour, but the classical story of metamorphoses is presented as a game of fetch in the local park. Crombach creates a hybrid between the art historical imagery from paintings of hounds...

Nicholas Crombach is interested in the complex interactions between humans and animals. Using sporting and hunting as markers of longstanding traditions of both adversarial and collaborative relationships between humans and animals, Crombach examines the cultural significance and the complex issues percolating domestication and domination, play and survival in the 21st century. Crombach combines references to mythology via a striking aesthetic, creating works which revel in their contradictions and contrasts. Notably, the artist draws from the myth of Diana and Actaeon, which provides a poignant framework for this new series. In Ovid’s tale Actaeon, a hunter and grandson of King Cadmus, is in the forest with his dogs when he spies Artemis (Diana), the venerated goddess of the hunt, in her bath attended by her nymphs. Diana’s nymphs try to cover her modesty as the goddess feels violated by Actaoen’s brash curiosity. Diana splashes water upon Actaeon, robbing him from his ability to speak and turning him from a mortal man into a stag who flees into the forest only to be hunted down and killed by his own dogs. The hunter becomes the hunted. Crombach’s Fetch (2018) refers to the mythology of Diana and Actaeon in its last tragic hour, but the classical story of metamorphoses is presented as a game of fetch in the local park. Crombach creates a hybrid between the art historical imagery from paintings of hounds hunting...

Text by Nancy Webb It’s Saturday night and Karine Payette is in her studio. We meander into a conversation about the dog she used to have and her soft spot for German shepherds, an intensely obedient and loyal breed in a deceivingly wolf-like package. Payette’s most recent series of photographs, sculptures and video work seem to speak directly to this preoccupation with the multifaceted nature of human-animal relationships—the dialogues of control, intimacy, violence and domestication that subtly take place on an interspecies level. Her workspace is part laboratory, part prop closet—a bowl of fur sits not far from her computer. Somehow in this bright, open, chemical-clean scented room, Payette conjures wildness. We are taken to a strange place, the borderlands of interspecies mingling. At one extreme of the animal-human dynamics scale is the stalwart compliance of a professionally trained German shepherd who responds to commands with robotic precision. Here, power is comfortably held by an off-screen voice, animality pacified by a set of linguistic prompts. At the other end of the scale is a sculpture of a human figure clad in red, sharing a languorous kiss with a wolf. The story of Little Red Riding Hood is immediately called to mind, except that here our hooded protagonist seems to have bailed on grandmother’s orders, instead opting for a forest floor make-out with her canine stalker. This taboo mise-en-scène is a brazen inquiry into the boundaries we maintain with our animal counterparts. Its scale and three-dimensionality contribute to a feeling of immersion that the artist has been courting with her work for the past several years. It feels as though you’ve just walked in on something: you are implicated and your discomfort is like an invisible mist that coats these inanimate beings. Elsewhere in Payette’s suite of anthropomorphic works, the demarcation between species grows even fainter. A photographic series depicts the slow encroachment of fur, scales and feathers on human skin—a striking process of contamination facilitated by touch. The fusion of flesh, charcoal cat fur and a pale silky dress...

Nicholas Crombach is interested in the complex interactions between humans and animals. Using sporting and hunting as markers of longstanding traditions of both adversarial and collaborative relationships between humans and animals, Crombach examines the cultural significance and the complex issues percolating domestication and domination, play and survival in the 21st century. Crombach combines references to mythology via a striking aesthetic, creating works which revel in their contradictions and contrasts. Notably, the artist draws from the myth of Diana and Actaeon, which provides a poignant framework for this new series. In Ovid’s tale Actaeon, a hunter and grandson of King Cadmus, is in the forest with his dogs when he spies Artemis (Diana), the venerated goddess of the hunt, in her bath attended by her nymphs. Diana’s nymphs try to cover her modesty as the goddess feels violated by Actaoen’s brash curiosity. Diana splashes water upon Actaeon, robbing him from his ability to speak and turning him from a mortal man into a stag who flees into the forest only to be hunted down and killed by his own dogs. The hunter becomes the hunted. Crombach’s Fetch (2018) refers to the mythology of Diana and Actaeon in its last tragic hour, but the classical story of metamorphoses is presented as a game of fetch in the local park. Crombach creates a hybrid between the art historical imagery from paintings of hounds...

French designer and graphic artist Stéphane Gautier draws on a unique talent for deciphering symbols and images in his art and transforming them into ...

Ardan Özmenoğlu draws from her own experiences as a Turkish woman to explore ideas about history, popular culture, and the formation of a national and cultural identity. Known for he...

Since graduating from the University of Colorado in 2010, Pichaske has risen to attention in the art world. She was an assistant to artist Cristina Cordova...

"The Chase" Wall Sculpture 71" x 59" inch by Gosha Ostretsov Born in 1967, in Moscow Lived in Paris for ten years (1988 - 1998), now lives and works in Moscow. PUBLIC COLLECTIONS: The State Tretyakov Gallery, St. Petersburg, Russia The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia The Moscow Contemporary Art Museum, Moscow, Russia The Saatchi Collection, London, England The Arctic and Antarctic Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia The Freud Museum of Dreams, St. Petersburg, Russia SOLO EXHIBITIONS: 2017 I’ve been abducted hundreds of times! Palazzo Nani Bernardo. 2016 I've been abducted hundreds of times! Triangle gallery, Moscow 2014 Autotrans NG. Zarya art center. Vladivostok 2010 Heavy Patients, Rabouan Mousson Gallery 2009 Apocalypse, Marat Guelman Gallery, Moscow Art Moscow, Triumph Gallery Banality and Eternity', Triumph Gallery Gosha for Kids, Triumph Gallery The Adventures of Robin Hood, Paradise Row, London 2008 Dead Souls...

"Cotton" Wall Sculpture 71" x 59" inch by Gosha Ostretsov Born in 1967, in Moscow Lived in Paris for ten years (1988 - 1998), now lives and works in Moscow. PUBLIC COLLECTIONS: The State Tretyakov Gallery, St. Petersburg, Russia The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia The Moscow Contemporary Art Museum, Moscow, Russia The Saatchi Collection, London, England The Arctic and Antarctic Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia The Freud Museum of Dreams, St. Petersburg, Russia SOLO EXHIBITIONS: 2017 I’ve been abducted hundreds of times! Palazzo Nani Bernardo. 2016 I've been abducted hundreds of times! Triangle gallery, Moscow 2014 Autotrans NG. Zarya art center. Vladivostok 2010 Heavy Patients, Rabouan Mousson Gallery 2009 Apocalypse, Marat Guelman Gallery, Moscow Art Moscow, Triumph Gallery Banality and Eternity', Triumph Gallery Gosha for Kids, Triumph Gallery The Adventures of Robin Hood, Paradise Row, London 2008 Dead Souls...

Magdalena Peszkowska born in 1980 in Gdańsk, Poland. Studied in Department of Painting at Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk (1999-2004). Diploma with special recognition in painting in 2004. The character of Magdalena Peszkowska's works Series Stand is like an poetic archive of memories, which call for a classification and reconstruction of the time of childhood and the intense experience of time with everything around it. Gdansk - where the artist comes from - becomes a mythical place, This city, with a very strong symbolic potential inherent in its history, needs editing from a single point of view. Magdalena Peszkowska uses her own photos or those from the family album. She transfers them to gray field blankets and camp beds with her own secret technology Then she paints on the used objects. Many of her objects show figures from the closest circle of Peszkowska, often it is herself, her family or places close to her in Gdansk. Her objects have intentional signs of use. The field blankets have a sewn-in wooden bar to hang them on the wall. The field military beds...