Nicholas Crombach

Xenolith II

2023

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...

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...

Miquel Aparici's sculptures are surprising assemblages made from old objects that had other uses in the past, and which the artist recovers and uses in a creative and ingenious way. ...

Magdalena Peszkowska born in 1980 in Gdańsk, Poland. Studied in Department of Painting at Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk (1999-2004). Diploma with special recognition in painting in 2004. The character of Magdalena Peszkowska's works Series Stand is like an poetic archive of memories, which call for a classification and reconstruction of the time of childhood and the intense experience of time with everything around it. Gdansk - where the artist comes from - becomes a mythical place, This city, with a very strong symbolic potential inherent in its history, needs editing from a single point of view. Magdalena Peszkowska uses her own photos or those from the family album. She transfers them to gray field blankets and camp beds with her own secret technology Then she paints on the used objects. Many of her objects show figures from the closest circle of Peszkowska, often it is herself, her family or places close to her in Gdansk. Her objects have intentional signs of use. The field blankets have a sewn-in wooden bar to hang them on the wall. The field military beds...