Patricia Piccinini

Boot Flower

2015

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...

"Mask of the Minister of Education" Sculpture 16" x 13" in by Gosha Ostretsov Edition 2/10 Born in 1967, in Moscow Lived in Paris for ten years (1988 - 1998), now lives and works i...

"Mask of the Minister of Culture" Sculpture 16" x 12" in by Gosha Ostretsov Edition 2/10 Born in 1967, in Moscow Lived in Paris for ten years (1988 - 1998), now lives and works in M...

This character is from A Fantastic Collision of The Three Worlds XXVIII. Amita Bhatt received her BFA from the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, India and her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland. Bhatt’s work has been exhibited at noteworthy venues such as the Bluestar Contemporary Art Center, Walters Art Museum, The Station Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Project Row Houses, all in the United States as well as Museo Pedro de Osma in Peru. She has also been the recipient of several prestigious awards and recently served as a Grant Panelist on the National Endowment for the Arts. Her works are included in many important private and public collections. Bhatt digs deep into world philosophies and mythologies to answer questions pertaining to our political as well as personal belief systems. Unafraid to explore uncomfortable territories, the artist mines from a range of sources to create hybrid creatures that are often symbolic of man’s psychological condition in an angst-ridden zeitgeist. In exploring issues of identity and violence, Bhatt’s research led her to the beginnings of mankind. Most ancient creation...

Using smooth, minimalist forms in black with bright green, blue, red and white, Israeli-based sculptor Benny Katz creates the playful essence of a body builder...