Jessica Houston

Different Geographies, Different Histories

2015

Patrick Beaulieu’s multi-disciplined practice creates finely tuned and subtle gestures that aim to re-focus our attention on the physical world that we see and experience. In convers...

My work emerges from research on memory and the remembrance of landscape, where vaporous atmospheres of evanescent recollections are illustrated. My work thus, contains ghostly and e...

King creates large format photographic landscapes in her studio with sculptural props and painted backdrops. She is interested in the tension between artifice and constructed realiti...

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...

Set of three bright photographs by Peggy Corpeny (American, b. 1958). Each piece is signed "P. Corpeny" in the lower right corner and has a sticker for "Heart Bow Press" on verso. Pr...

Transformation (Suburbia) - 2004 40x48cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print based on the Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Artist Inventory No. 1675....

Runaway Ride - The Getaway (The Last Picture Show) - 1999 40x40cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Artist Inventory #345. ...

Renée's Dream - The Boys (Days of Heaven). Part of the 29 Palms, CA project. - 2006, 20x20cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs, archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid. Signature ...