Karine Payette Sculptures

Karine Payette was born in 1983 in Montreal, Quebec, where she lives and works. Working primarily with sculpture and installation, she reproduces, for the most part, environments tha...

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...

Through a variety of structural and wall-hanged pieces, Karine Payette’s Adaptation examines how changes in the environment can begin to have an impact on our physical existence. Ele...

Through a variety of structural and wall-hanged pieces, Karine Payette’s Adaptation examines how changes in the environment can begin to have an impact on our physical existence. Ele...

Through a variety of structural and wall-hanged pieces, Karine Payette’s Adaptation examines how changes in the environment can begin to have an impact on our physical existence. Ele...

Through a variety of structural and wall-hanged pieces, Karine Payette’s Adaptation examines how changes in the environment can begin to have an impact on our physical existence. Ele...

Through a variety of structural and wall-hanged pieces, Karine Payette’s Adaptation examines how changes in the environment can begin to have an impact on our physical existence. Ele...

Karine Payette was born in 1983 in Montreal, Quebec, where she lives and works. Working primarily with sculpture and installation, she reproduces, for the most part, environments tha...

Through a variety of structural and wall-hanged pieces, Karine Payette’s Adaptation examines how changes in the environment can begin to have an impact on our physical existence. Ele...

Through a variety of structural and wall-hanged pieces, Karine Payette’s Adaptation examines how changes in the environment can begin to have an impact on our physical existence. Ele...

Through a variety of structural and wall-hanged pieces, Karine Payette’s Adaptation examines how changes in the environment can begin to have an impact on our physical existence. Ele...

Through a variety of structural and wall-hanged pieces, Karine Payette’s Adaptation examines how changes in the environment can begin to have an impact on our physical existence. Ele...

Through a variety of structural and wall-hanged pieces, Karine Payette’s Adaptation examines how changes in the environment can begin to have an impact on our physical existence. Ele...

Through a variety of structural and wall-hanged pieces, Karine Payette’s Adaptation examines how changes in the environment can begin to have an impact on our physical existence. Ele...

Through a variety of structural and wall-hanged pieces, Karine Payette’s Adaptation examines how changes in the environment can begin to have an impact on our physical existence. Ele...

Through a variety of structural and wall-hanged pieces, Karine Payette’s Adaptation examines how changes in the environment can begin to have an impact on our physical existence. Ele...

Working primarily in the medium of installation, but also that of photography and video, Karine Payette creates fictional environments that function as freeze frames in which narratives are suspended. In her work, she uses everyday objects to construct extensive dream-like scenes in a hyperrealist manner. These mises-en-scène serve to hint at a potential narrative which evokes the precariousness of our surrounding world. Through the playful use of everyday objects that are transposed into extraordinary situations, she craftily toys with our vision of things, so as to stimulate reflection about the instability of the materials and forms which are part of our living environments. She questions notions of comfort and displeasure in a perpetually transforming world. Karine Payette, who holds a MFA from UQAM, lives and works in Montreal. Her works have been displayed in solo exhibitions, notably at the Galerie de l’UQAM (Confort instable, 2012) and at Le lieu, Centre en art actuel in Quebec City (L’autre dimanche matin...