Pigment Figurative Sculptures

In his sculptures, drawings and paintings, Michael O’Keefe employs unpredictable processes as a means to discover content. He couples accident and chance with unconventional methods, tools, and materials as a means to move beyond the boundaries of his tendencies. In his recent sculptures of heads...

In his sculptures, drawings and paintings, Michael O’Keefe employs unpredictable processes as a means to discover content. He couples accident and chance with unconventional methods,...

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...

Ulysses, 2012 Canvas, pigment, reinforcing mesh (Signed on bottom) 39 2/5 H × 60 1/5 W × 47 1/5 D in. 100 H × 153 W × 120 D cm Unique The sculpture "Ulysses" was exhibited in the so...

Concieved in 1957, this edition started to be executed in 1988 IKB pigment and synthetic resin on plaster cast, in plexiglas, signed Rotraut Klein Moquay and numbered HC XXX/L on the...

This authentic 19th century wooden Pende "Mbuya" Songye Mask from the Democratic Republic of the Congo is displayed with a custom made wood and metal displ...

This classic early 20th century Itok mask is from the Kuba/Ngeende culture in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is rare to fin...

his late 19th century authentic wooden Lumbo Ogooue Mask is from the river basin of Ngounie Province in Gabon . The female face has slit eye holes with deeply arched painted eyebro...