Canada - Figurative Photography

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...

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...

Open and Limited Edition C-Prints Hand Signed by Richard Beland 8" x 10" Unframed Open Edition 11" x 14" Unframed Open Edition 16" x 20" Unframed Open Edition 20" x 24" Unframed ...

In a series of portraits documenting the body in nature, Isaac’s model dons a fantastical mask — one side overgrown with fledgling greenery while the other half conjures a ghost of t...

In a series of portraits documenting the body in nature, Isaac’s model dons a fantastical mask — one side overgrown with fledgling greenery while the other half conjures a ghost of t...

In a series of portraits documenting the body in nature, Isaac’s model dons a fantastical mask — one side overgrown with fledgling greenery while the other half conjures a ghost of t...

In a series of portraits documenting the body in nature, Isaac’s model dons a fantastical mask — one side overgrown with fledgling greenery while the other half conjures a ghost of t...

In Jessica Houston’s Afterward, Silence (Franklin’s Crewmen’s Grave, Beechey Island) a single pale gravestone stands on an otherwise desolate ashen shore – a relic of Sir John Frankl...

Collage of photographs and Pantone color swatches on paper Suspended in a Sunbeam, is a series of mixed-media works that span Jessica Houston’s decade-long engagement with the Canad...

Collage of photographs and Pantone color swatches on paper Suspended in a Sunbeam, is a series of mixed-media works that span Jessica Houston’s decade-long engagement with the Canad...

Collage of photographs and Pantone color swatches on paper Suspended in a Sunbeam, is a series of mixed-media works that span Jessica Houston’s decade-long engagement with the Canad...

During the summer of 2017 and 2018, Patrick Beaulieu realized the performative excursion EL PERDIDO. Travelling with the geographer Alexis Pernet on board a 1977 Dodge camper van, th...

During the summer of 2017 and 2018, Patrick Beaulieu realized the performative excursion EL PERDIDO. Travelling with the geographer Alexis Pernet on board a 1977 Dodge camper van, th...

During the summer of 2017 and 2018, Patrick Beaulieu realized the performative excursion EL PERDIDO. Travelling with the geographer Alexis Pernet on board a 1977 Dodge camper van, th...

During the summer of 2017 and 2018, Patrick Beaulieu realized the performative excursion EL PERDIDO. Travelling with the geographer Alexis Pernet on board a 1977 Dodge camper van, th...

During the summer of 2017 and 2018, Patrick Beaulieu realized the performative excursion EL PERDIDO. Travelling with the geographer Alexis Pernet on board a 1977 Dodge camper van, th...

During the summer of 2017 and 2018, Patrick Beaulieu realized the performative excursion EL PERDIDO. Travelling with the geographer Alexis Pernet on board a 1977 Dodge camper van, th...

During the summer of 2017 and 2018, Patrick Beaulieu realized the performative excursion EL PERDIDO. Travelling with the geographer Alexis Pernet on board a 1977 Dodge camper van, th...

During the summer of 2017 and 2018, Patrick Beaulieu realized the performative excursion EL PERDIDO. Travelling with the geographer Alexis Pernet on board a 1977 Dodge camper van, th...

During the summer of 2017 and 2018, Patrick Beaulieu realized the performative excursion EL PERDIDO. Travelling with the geographer Alexis Pernet on board a 1977 Dodge camper van, th...

During the summer of 2017 and 2018, Patrick Beaulieu realized the performative excursion EL PERDIDO. Travelling with the geographer Alexis Pernet on board a 1977 Dodge camper van, th...

During the summer of 2017 and 2018, Patrick Beaulieu realized the performative excursion EL PERDIDO. Travelling with the geographer Alexis Pernet on board a 1977 Dodge camper van, th...

During the summer of 2017 and 2018, Patrick Beaulieu realized the performative excursion EL PERDIDO. Travelling with the geographer Alexis Pernet on board a 1977 Dodge camper van, th...

During the summer of 2017 and 2018, Patrick Beaulieu realized the performative excursion EL PERDIDO. Travelling with the geographer Alexis Pernet on board a 1977 Dodge camper van, th...

During the summer of 2017 and 2018, Patrick Beaulieu realized the performative excursion EL PERDIDO. Travelling with the geographer Alexis Pernet on board a 1977 Dodge camper van, th...

Four years ago, I stumbled upon the site of a log-home developer on the traditional territory of the We Wai Kai Nation, my reserve on northeastern Vancouver Island. I found it comica...

Beyond Sociology: The Act of Seeing a Person Text by Edwin Janzen It is hardly surprising that in our society perceptions of homeless persons remain two-dimensional, stereotypical, inadequate. Even for the rare administration tackling the problems of homelessness in an effective, meaningful way, the homeless person’s humanity is buried beneath a mountain of endless statistical markers: mental illness, substance abuse, soup-kitchen attendance, etc. The enormous negativity lingering about the resultant profile permits scant room for other, arguably important accoutrements of the human experience—character, emotion, intellect, beauty, relationship to divinity—and leaves homeless persons basically where they already are: on the street, the objects of middle-class loathing or pity. Struck by this depressing determinism, artist Bevan Ramsay set out to cast portrait busts of homeless persons (one woman, the others men), producing an edition in fine, white statuary Hydrocal plaster mounted on mahogany bases. These portraits, titled Lesser Gods...

Karine Giboulo creates colourful miniature worlds in which depictions of reality and flights of fantasy mingle. Her intricate sculpted scenes use pathos and humour to comment on the ...