Mari Ito

Quiero Beber Una Cerveza - 21st Century, Contemporary, Japanese Art, Sculpture

2015

Series: Origin of Desire Mari Ito was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1980. She majored in Nihonga, Japanese-style painting made with traditional practices, techniques and materials. She mo...

Complete title: El Origen del Deseo - Ritmo del Despertar (The Origin of Desire -Awakening Rhythm) Mari Ito was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1980. She majored in Nihonga, Japanese-style ...

Complete title: La Transformación del Deseo - Quiero Estar Dentro de Alegría (The Transformation of Desire - I want to be Inside of Happiness) Mari Ito was born in Tokyo, Japan in ...

Complete title: La Transformación del Deseo - Explosión de Apetito (The Transformation of Desire - Explosion of Appetite) Mari Ito was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1980. She majored in N...

Complete title: El Origen del Deseo - Buen Rollo II (The Origin of Desire - Good Vibes II) Mari Ito was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1980. She majored in Nihonga, Japanese-style painting...

Complete title: El Origen del Deseo - Buen Rollo I (The Origin of Desire - Good Vibes I) Mari Ito was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1980. She majored in Nihonga, Japanese-style painting m...

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...

Based on her breathtaking golden faces chandelier named Cover-Discover, made for the Tel Aviv 2020 Biannale, Dana Bloom is now offering a limited edition of...

'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...

'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...