Karine Payette

La Capture

2016

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...

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...

Challenger consists of a replica of the escape hatch from the NASA space shuttle installed as if it has fallen from the sky and flattened a Canada P...

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

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

With its meticulous attention to detail, Karine Payette’s work opens up numerous reflections on the different ways we perceive reality. Payette achieves this by adroitly evoking the notion of doubt. Both playful and offbeat, her universe is built up from stripped-down stagings that conjure up private, domestic stories, and scenes from everyday life. Carefully arranging objects in space, she creates “zones of anxiety” where different elements overlap: loss of control, domination, and forms that might themselves take over. The artworks brought together in L’ombre d’un doute highlight the various touchstones of the multidisciplinary practice Karine Payette has been developing since 2010. The exhibition borrows its title from the Alfred Hitchcock film of the same name (Shadow of a Doubt), where a young girl discovers the dark side of the world. This shadowy reference evokes the fragrance of mystery that wafts among Payette’s works, and the need to decipher, like a riddle, that which takes place before our eyes. As soon as he/she enters the exhibition, the viewer is confronted with a puddle of milk covering the floor, in which he/she finds several kernels of floating Rice Krispies...

Untitled 06, 2016 Mixed media on metal sheet (Signed on reverse) 31 1/2 H × 70 9/10 W × 39 2/5 D in 80 H × 180 W × 100 D cm Zsolt Berszán’s work speaks of repulsion and fascination and at the same time speaks about shapes that lie on the border between hallucination and obsession wherein the identity and order were disrupted. Themes such as the double and the metamorphosis, otherwise put, themes of atrophied characters are all representations of the abject. Berszán’s creation is located at the fine border between the representation of identity and its dissolution thusly aiming to represent the non-symbolized. The dynamic separation and the transitional object...

Made in Ukraine, 2020. Meet this big interior golden cactus sculpture. Location and Delivery from: Ukraine Authors: Created by Rostyslav Kozhman and Iryna Antoniuk (Irena Tone) Mat...

Davide Quayola (Italian, b. 1982) "Laocoon Fragment #8_005.003" 2016 Made of Iron, epoxy, fiberglass, mirror-polished steel & wood. Dimensions: 19.7 x 11 x 15.75 inches (50 x 28 x 40 cm) Base Plate Dimensions: .8 x 23.7 x 23.7 inches (2 x 60 x 60 cm) base From the signed and numbered edition of 3 "Quayola employs technology as a lens to explore the tensions and equilibriums between seemingly opposing forces: the real and artificial, figurative and abstract, old and new. Constructing immersive installations, he engages with and re-imagines canonical imagery through contemporary technology. Landscape painting, classical sculpture and iconography are some of the historical aesthetics that serve as a point of departure for Quayola’s hybrid compositions. His varied practice, all deriving from custom computer software, also includes audiovisual performance, immersive video installations, sculpture, and works on paper. His work has been performed and exhibited in many prestigious institutions worldwide including V&A Museum, London; Park Avenue Armory, New York; National Art Center, Tokyo; UCCA, Beijing; How Art Museum, Shanghai; SeMA, Seoul; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Ars Electronica, Linz; Sonar Festival, Barcelona and Sundance Film Festival. Also a frequent collaborator on musical projects, Quayola has worked with composers, orchestras and musicians including London Contemporary Orchestra, National Orchestra of Bordeaux, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Vanessa Wagner, Jamie XX...

Kim Seungwoo is a contemporary Korean sculptor, lives in Seoul, South Korea. Seungwoo is famous for his sculptures made from coins and buttons. He create...

Kim Seungwoo is a contemporary Korean sculptor, lives in Seoul, South Korea. Seungwoo is famous for his sculptures made from coins and buttons. He creates hyper-realistic, life-size...

Kim Seungwoo is a contemporary Korean sculptor, based in Seoul, South Korea, famous for his sculptures made of coins or buttons.