Patrick Bérubé

Perdre du poids

2017

Laughter, discomfort, perplexity: these are all plausible reactions to the work by sculptor Cal Lane. The artist’s most recent body of work is an affective assemblage of incongruous parts that, taken together, violate our mental patterns and expectations. Charged with contradictions, metaphor, sexual undertones, and unsettling associations, Lane’s unlikely combinations use absurdity as a way of pointing to western society’s normalized habits and conventions, often with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. For the exhibition Try Me, Lane installs a basketball court in the gallery. The two basketball hoops on opposing walls are embellished with silver-coated frames and lustrous mirrors, which serve as decorative backboards. In place of nets, women’s black lace underwear delicately hang from hoops. A decorative rug stenciled with court lines performs as the court floor. It is a mise-en-scène set in motion by viewer’s reconciliation of the individual parts to the whole, and to their original function. Panties regard themselves in the mirror or perhaps measure up their opponent, which, not without irony, is the mirror image of itself. Themes of gender and sexuality are performed and imagined in the upward voyeuristic gaze of the viewer and the expected swoosh of the ball into the net. This is further elaborated by phallic impressions formed by court lines and their likeness to a work of modernist abstraction—a movement wrought by notions of masculinity. The decorative rug’s connection to femininity and domesticity juxtaposes the rigid geometry. Lane further explores the historical gendering of technology, industry, and war in her series of wallpaper drawings, which depict war submarines on cloud patterned wallpaper. The innocence of the submarine in popular culture and its reality as a phallic war object...

Laughter, discomfort, perplexity: these are all plausible reactions to the work by sculptor Cal Lane. The artist’s most recent body of work is an affective assemblage of incongruous ...

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...

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...

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...

Laughter, discomfort, perplexity: these are all plausible reactions to the work by sculptor Cal Lane. The artist’s most recent body of work is an affective assemblage of incongruous parts that, taken together, violate our mental patterns and expectations. Charged with contradictions, metaphor, sexual undertones, and unsettling associations, Lane’s unlikely combinations use absurdity as a way of pointing to western society’s normalized habits and conventions, often with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. For the exhibition Try Me, Lane installs a basketball court in the gallery. The two basketball hoops on opposing walls are embellished with silver-coated frames and lustrous mirrors, which serve as decorative backboards. In place of nets, women’s black lace underwear delicately hang from hoops. A decorative rug stenciled with court lines performs as the court floor. It is a mise-en-scène set in motion by viewer’s reconciliation of the individual parts to the whole, and to their original function. Panties regard themselves in the mirror or perhaps measure up their opponent, which, not without irony, is the mirror image of itself. Themes of gender and sexuality are performed and imagined in the upward voyeuristic gaze of the viewer and the expected swoosh of the ball into the net. This is further elaborated by phallic impressions formed by court lines and their likeness to a work of modernist abstraction—a movement wrought by notions of masculinity. The decorative rug’s connection to femininity and domesticity juxtaposes the rigid geometry. Lane further explores the historical gendering of technology, industry, and war in her series of wallpaper drawings, which depict war submarines on cloud patterned wallpaper. The innocence of the submarine in popular culture and its reality as a phallic war object...

Hand-built ceramic, flashe, metallic foil, UV matte finish, 19.5" high x 10" wide x 5" deep. Black, gold, red, blue. COA available upon request

"As an artist I strive to create elegant sculptures that capture the true essence of the subject matter. Form, line and surface are used as the visual language. The figure is abstrac...

Cat Sirot is a French plastic artist, with a focus on painting and Sculpture. She lives near Paris and works in her Argenteuil Studio. Through her sculptural...

Cat Sirot is a French plastic artist, with a focus on painting and Sculpture. She lives near Paris and works in her Argenteuil Studio. Through her sculptural work she speaks about lo...

Golden kinetic sculpture by Gianfranco Meggiato, bronze. In his work, Meggiato gets inspiration from the most mysterious city on Earth, city where he was born, lives and works - Ven...

Alabaster on steel 12 x 12 x 14 inches