Jessica Houston

The Situation As It Is

2021

The first decades of the 21st century shaped the period of reconfiguration of the "world order", according to Pedro Pablo Gómez1, into three options: "rewesternalization, dewesternal...

Bone China emerged as a reflection on the relationship between synthetic and organic aesthetic properties. By fusing the two, Ramsay has attempted to create...

Nicholas Crombach (BFA, 2012) is an artist working in Kingston Ontario. Crombach has been awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award. His solo exhibition, Behind Elegantly Carved Wooden Doors, was presented at Art Mûr...

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...

'We surround ourselves with elements from nature in the form of manicured lawns, sculpted trees, and our domesticated companions. We bend the natural world to our tastes and create a...

'We surround ourselves with elements from nature in the form of manicured lawns, sculpted trees, and our domesticated companions. We bend the natural world to our tastes and create a...

'We surround ourselves with elements from nature in the form of manicured lawns, sculpted trees, and our domesticated companions. We bend the natural world to our tastes and create a...

"Fancy! WTF (Trio)" Set of 3 Limited edition glass pill sculpture by Edie Nadelhaft. Edition of 9. Pill Size: 14 x 4 x 4 inches (each). Installation size: 14 x 18 x 4 inches (appr...