Jonathan Hobin

In the Playroom: American Idol

2010

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...

Isabelle van Zeijl is recognized for her mastery in creating striking self-portraits. She produces her images autonomously, taking on the roles of model, creator, object and subject ...

Sylva Koscina - Vintage Photo is a vintage black and white photograph realized in the mid-20th Century. Good conditions. Sylva Koscina is considered on...

Giulietta Masina - Golden Age of Italian Cinema is a vintage black and white photograph realized in the 1960s. Good conditions. Giulietta Masina is considered one of the best Italian actresses best known for her performances as Gelsomina in La Strada directed by her husband Federico Fellini. Her portrayal of an innocent woman served as the emotional focal point for some of Fellini’s best films. Masina began acting in student theatre productions when she was in her teens. Although she enrolled as a student at the University of Rome in 1938, she continued to devote a good deal of time to acting in university plays and on the radio . In 1939 she made her professional debut in an Italian translation of Thornton Wilder...

Philippe Noiret - Vintage Photo is a vintage black and white photograph realized in the 1980s. Good conditions.