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Item Ships From: Montreal
Entre nous IV
By Karine Payette
Located in Montreal, Quebec
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...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Photographic Paper
Entre nous V
By Karine Payette
Located in Montreal, Quebec
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...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Photographic Paper
Lighthouse
By Holly King
Located in Montreal, Quebec
King creates large format photographic landscapes in her studio with sculptural props and painted backdrops. She is interested in the tension between artifice and constructed realiti...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Photographic Paper
Pain Killer
By Karine Giboulo
Located in Montreal, Quebec
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 ...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Photographic Paper
Ingrained
By Henri Venne
Located in Montreal, Quebec
My work emerges from research on memory and the remembrance of landscape, where vaporous atmospheres of evanescent recollections are illustrated. My work thus, contains ghostly and e...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Plexiglass, Digital
Nuit blanche à Chicago
By Michel Piquette
Located in Montreal, Quebec
It is the luminous colours of Michel Piquette’s works that first catch the eye. His chromatic circles that stir up vision take root in an aesthetic tradition a few decades old alread...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Aluminum
Almost Paradise
By Holly King
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Holly King’s photographs draw from memories of landscapes, and reference film, art and literature. Her images are cinematic and striking, seemingly rea...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Photographic Paper
for intérieur – sang 4
By Patrick Beaulieu
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Patrick Beaulieu’s multi-disciplined practice creates finely tuned and subtle gestures that aim to re-focus our attention on the physical world that we see and experience. In convers...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Photographic Paper
Enduring Claims (Antarctica)
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Digital
Golden Slumbers
By Jennifer Small
Located in Montreal, Quebec
For Nicolas Bourriaud, the flea market is a place where “past production is recycled and switches direction” and where “an object is given a new idea.” On the stalls of the flea market, objects are resurrected and given a second life. This is where Jennifer Small...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Digital
Valley
By Holly King
Located in Montreal, Quebec
King creates large format photographic landscapes in her studio with sculptural props and painted backdrops. She is interested in the tension between artifice and constructed realiti...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Photographic Paper
$5,000
Ascent
By Holly King
Located in Montreal, Quebec
King creates large format photographic landscapes in her studio with sculptural props and painted backdrops. She is interested in the tension between artifice and constructed realiti...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Photographic Paper
$5,000
Glow
By Holly King
Located in Montreal, Quebec
King creates large format photographic landscapes in her studio with sculptural props and painted backdrops. She is interested in the tension between artifice and constructed realiti...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Photographic Paper
$5,000
Marea # 4, Photograph, Silver Hal/Gelatin
By Pietro Canali
Located in Yardley, PA
Marea # 4 . Caribbean Sea, Barbados, 2013. Silver Halide Fuji Flex Crystal Archive paper printed with LightJet Oce 430, face mounted with 1/8†UV Tru-VU Clear Conservation Grade A...
Category
2010s Other Art Style Montreal - Photography
Materials
Silver Gelatin
Marea # 10, Photograph, Silver Hal/Gelatin
By Pietro Canali
Located in Yardley, PA
Marea # 10 . Sandy Lane Bay, Barbados 2013. Silver Halide Fuji Flex Crystal Archive paper printed with LightJet Oce 430, face mounted with 1/8†UV Tru-VU Clear Conservation Grade ...
Category
2010s Other Art Style Montreal - Photography
Materials
Silver Gelatin
Marea # 5, Photograph, Silver Hal/Gelatin
By Pietro Canali
Located in Yardley, PA
Marea # 5 . Sea of Cortez, Mexico, 2013. Silver Halide Fuji Flex Crystal Archive paper printed with LightJet Oce 430, face mounted with 1/8†UV Tru-VU Clear Conservation Grade Acr...
Category
2010s Other Art Style Montreal - Photography
Materials
Silver Gelatin
Marea # 12, Photograph, Silver Hal/Gelatin
By Pietro Canali
Located in Yardley, PA
Marea # 12 . Fort Lauderdale Beach, USA, 2013. Silver Halide Fuji Flex Crystal Archive paper printed with LightJet Oce 430, face mounted with 1/8†UV Tru-VU Clear Conservation Gra...
Category
2010s Other Art Style Montreal - Photography
Materials
Silver Gelatin
Lemon, Photograph, Silver Hal/Gelatin
By Pietro Canali
Located in Yardley, PA
Silver Halide Fuji Flex Crystal Archive paper printed with LightJet Oce 430, face mounted with 1/8†UV Tru-VU Clear Conservation Grade Acrylic and backed with 3mm Aluminium Dibond....
Category
2010s Other Art Style Montreal - Photography
Materials
Silver Gelatin
Orchid, Photograph, Silver Hal/Gelatin
By Pietro Canali
Located in Yardley, PA
Silver Halide Fuji Flex Crystal Archive paper printed with LightJet Oce 430, face mounted with 1/8†UV Tru-VU Clear Conservation Grade Acrylic and backed with 3mm Aluminium Dibond....
Category
2010s Other Art Style Montreal - Photography
Materials
Silver Gelatin
Mer Morte, Israel
By Michel Piquette
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Through photography, Michel Piquette creates captures of time, animated by a paradoxical quest for an image preceding any technique. By weaving together aspects of geometry and abstr...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Digital
We are part of that nature we see to understand
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Mixed Media, Photographic Paper
Which we are part
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Mixed Media, Photographic Paper
Embryon 9
By Laurent Lamarche
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Laurent Lamarche’s objects strike a scientific chord in contrast to an art world overwrought with digital spectacles and ominous critique. Lamarche’s work bares a rigorous formalism ...
Category
2010s Abstract Montreal - Photography
Materials
Plexiglass, Digital
Signs of disorientation
By Patrick Beaulieu
Located in Montreal, Quebec
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Digital
Signs of disorientation
By Patrick Beaulieu
Located in Montreal, Quebec
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Digital
Signs of disorientation
By Patrick Beaulieu
Located in Montreal, Quebec
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Digital
Révélations 7
By Patrick Beaulieu
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Patrick Beaulieu’s most recent project Révélations uses installation and digital prints to explore how artistic manipulation can create shifts in one’s expectations of the visual experience. Beaulieu clearly acknowledges his artistic presence in the work through mechanical and digital manipulation of the objects and images he presents. He becomes more than a passive observer and recorder of his physical world; the alteration of conventional photographs implants his voice and vision into the work. This approach directly addresses and contrasts artistic practices which seek to conceal the artist’s hand. His method diverges from those that attempt to present an uninterrupted and uncontaminated record, such as some documentary and straight photography. In using these stylized techniques, Beaulieu makes a palpable proclamation regarding the subjective and flexible condition of images.
In Révélations, images of trees, moss, leaves and other natural objects are presented in strict colour schemes of muted grays, browns and greens. Though these colours are familiar components of the natural world that we experience in day-to-day life and in photographs of nature...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Digital
Poussières de forêt (Révélations) 1
By Patrick Beaulieu
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Patrick Beaulieu’s most recent project Révélations uses installation and digital prints to explore how artistic manipulation can create shifts in one’s expectations of the visual experience. Beaulieu clearly acknowledges his artistic presence in the work through mechanical and digital manipulation of the objects and images he presents. He becomes more than a passive observer and recorder of his physical world; the alteration of conventional photographs implants his voice and vision into the work. This approach directly addresses and contrasts artistic practices which seek to conceal the artist’s hand. His method diverges from those that attempt to present an uninterrupted and uncontaminated record, such as some documentary and straight photography. In using these stylized techniques, Beaulieu makes a palpable proclamation regarding the subjective and flexible condition of images.
In Révélations, images of trees, moss, leaves and other natural objects are presented in strict colour schemes of muted grays, browns and greens. Though these colours are familiar components of the natural world that we experience in day-to-day life and in photographs of nature...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Digital
VFH NZ 3
By Michel Piquette
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Through photography, Michel Piquette creates captures of time, animated by a paradoxical quest for an image preceding any technique. By weaving together aspects of geometry and abstr...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Digital
Révélations 5
By Patrick Beaulieu
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Patrick Beaulieu’s most recent project Révélations uses installation and digital prints to explore how artistic manipulation can create shifts in one’s expectations of the visual experience. Beaulieu clearly acknowledges his artistic presence in the work through mechanical and digital manipulation of the objects and images he presents. He becomes more than a passive observer and recorder of his physical world; the alteration of conventional photographs implants his voice and vision into the work. This approach directly addresses and contrasts artistic practices which seek to conceal the artist’s hand. His method diverges from those that attempt to present an uninterrupted and uncontaminated record, such as some documentary and straight photography. In using these stylized techniques, Beaulieu makes a palpable proclamation regarding the subjective and flexible condition of images.
In Révélations, images of trees, moss, leaves and other natural objects are presented in strict colour schemes of muted grays, browns and greens. Though these colours are familiar components of the natural world that we experience in day-to-day life and in photographs of nature...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Digital
VHF Iceland
By Michel Piquette
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Through photography, Michel Piquette creates captures of time, animated by a paradoxical quest for an image preceding any technique. By weaving together aspects of geometry and abstr...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Digital
Révélations 1
By Patrick Beaulieu
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Patrick Beaulieu’s most recent project Révélations uses installation and digital prints to explore how artistic manipulation can create shifts in one’s expectations of the visual experience. Beaulieu clearly acknowledges his artistic presence in the work through mechanical and digital manipulation of the objects and images he presents. He becomes more than a passive observer and recorder of his physical world; the alteration of conventional photographs implants his voice and vision into the work. This approach directly addresses and contrasts artistic practices which seek to conceal the artist’s hand. His method diverges from those that attempt to present an uninterrupted and uncontaminated record, such as some documentary and straight photography. In using these stylized techniques, Beaulieu makes a palpable proclamation regarding the subjective and flexible condition of images.
In Révélations, images of trees, moss, leaves and other natural objects are presented in strict colour schemes of muted grays, browns and greens. Though these colours are familiar components of the natural world that we experience in day-to-day life and in photographs of nature...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Digital
VFH Montreal
By Michel Piquette
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Through photography, Michel Piquette creates captures of time, animated by a paradoxical quest for an image preceding any technique. By weaving together aspects of geometry and abstr...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Digital
This Wayward Floating Body
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Text by Nancy Webb
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 reli...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Digital
Elevation 3
By Henri Venne
Located in Montreal, Quebec
In the digital age, we collectively photograph everything all of the time. But how much does anyone remember from a scene or a moment when looking at a digital photo? Someone could g...
Category
2010s Abstract Montreal - Photography
Materials
Plexiglass, Photographic Paper
Horizon #5
By Michel Piquette
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Through photography, Michel Piquette creates captures of time, animated by a paradoxical quest for an image preceding any technique. By weaving together aspects of geometry and abstr...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Digital
Horizon #1
By Michel Piquette
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Through photography, Michel Piquette creates captures of time, animated by a paradoxical quest for an image preceding any technique. By weaving together aspects of geometry and abstr...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Digital
Horizon #3
By Michel Piquette
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Through photography, Michel Piquette creates captures of time, animated by a paradoxical quest for an image preceding any technique. By weaving together aspects of geometry and abstr...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Digital
Horizon #6
By Michel Piquette
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Through photography, Michel Piquette creates captures of time, animated by a paradoxical quest for an image preceding any technique. By weaving together aspects of geometry and abstr...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Digital
Horizon #9
By Michel Piquette
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Through photography, Michel Piquette creates captures of time, animated by a paradoxical quest for an image preceding any technique. By weaving together aspects of geometry and abstr...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Digital
Nothing of This Remains
By Henri Venne
Located in Montreal, Quebec
It is within the locality of the dream where we are at once sentient of ourselves within a multitude of reflections. The momentary awareness of self reveals transitions between those...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Montreal - Photography
Materials
Metal
The Place Of Many Fish
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
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...
Category
2010s Montreal - Photography
Materials
Photographic Film
Waiting for the Colour of Spring
By Henri Venne
Located in Montreal, Quebec
A viewer standing in front of the work of Henri Venne might feel simultaneously at home and confused. A seamless merging of photographic and painterly elements, Venne's images at onc...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Montreal - Photography
Materials
Plexiglass, Digital
Heavenly Invitation
By Holly King
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Text by Amber Berson
Canadian photographer Holly King’s Mangrove series is an investigation into the artist’s own subconscious. The photographs border on the uncanny, although never uncomfortably so. Instead, her preternatural compositions engage the viewer’s curiosity – the viewer is not sure how to approach, and yet is drawn to do so. At times the images are reflective, occasionally disquieting and always thought provoking. The twisted roots of the mangrove forests that form the base of this series provide an entry point for an investigation into the shadowy parts of the artist’s imagination.
The differences between what we know to be real and what we perceive as real are often slight. The work of Holly King stems from an attempt to prevail over the uncharted territory of both her imagination and that which is perceived as true. In her creations, King endeavours to understand her subconscious mindscape as manifested through photographs recalling actual landscapes.
This new series, stemming from earlier pieces also focused on roots, reflects King’s interest in drawing, in the linear subject and in geometric abstraction. It is a move away from previous series – despite the photographic medium in which King works, her oeuvre has contained a certain painterly quality. These new photographs tend to melt into themselves, drawing the viewer in and letting the imagination drift. The Mangrove series causes the viewer to approach with at a slower pace, to investigate deeply into the darker nooks and crannies and to attempt to find reason within a work that so clearly plays with our understanding of real and imaginary.
Nothing is incidental in King’s photographs, yet it is not always manipulated. King’s process often involves the use of maquettes – not digital manipulation of the images – creating an eerily surreal image that seem both familiar and strange. Her photos go beyond setting up the angle and vantage point of the shot; they force us to try to see things as the artist does by their very nature. In her own way, King follows in the footsteps of other notable Canadian landscape artists...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Photographic Paper
Dusking Time, Sphere
By Holly King
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Holly King creates large format photographic landscapes in her studio with sculptural props and painted backdrops. She is interested in the tension between artifice and constructed r...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
C Print
Still life #4
By Holly King
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Holly King creates large format photographic landscapes in her studio with sculptural props and painted backdrops. She is interested in the tension between artifice and constructed r...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
C Print
Still life #8
By Holly King
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Holly King creates large format photographic landscapes in her studio with sculptural props and painted backdrops. She is interested in the tension between artifice and constructed r...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
C Print
Embryon 5
By Laurent Lamarche
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Laurent Lamarche’s objects strike a scientific chord in contrast to an art world overwrought with digital spectacles and ominous critique. Lamarche’s work bares a rigorous formalism ...
Category
2010s Abstract Montreal - Photography
Materials
Plexiglass, Digital
Embryon 11
By Laurent Lamarche
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Laurent Lamarche’s objects strike a scientific chord in contrast to an art world overwrought with digital spectacles and ominous critique. Lamarche’s work bares a rigorous formalism ...
Category
2010s Abstract Montreal - Photography
Materials
Plexiglass, Digital
Embryon 10
By Laurent Lamarche
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Laurent Lamarche’s objects strike a scientific chord in contrast to an art world overwrought with digital spectacles and ominous critique. Lamarche’s work bares a rigorous formalism ...
Category
2010s Abstract Montreal - Photography
Materials
Plexiglass, Digital
Embryon 7
By Laurent Lamarche
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Laurent Lamarche’s objects strike a scientific chord in contrast to an art world overwrought with digital spectacles and ominous critique. Lamarche’s work bares a rigorous formalism ...
Category
2010s Abstract Montreal - Photography
Materials
Plexiglass, Digital
Chalk Shoreline
By Holly King
Located in Montreal, Quebec
King creates large format photographic landscapes in her studio with sculptural props and painted backdrops. She is interested in the tension between artifice and constructed realiti...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Photographic Paper
Plasma 5
By Laurent Lamarche
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Informed by microbiology, Laurent Lamarche’s sculptural installations and photographic production look like living unidentified microorganisms. Its narrative is ambiguous, constantly...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Montreal - Photography
Materials
Plexiglass, Digital Pigment
Berlin
By Michel Piquette
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Michel Piquette: chromatic cities
By Anaïs Castro
It is the luminous colours of Michel Piquette’s works that first catch the eye. His chromatic circles that stir up vision take r...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Montreal - Photography
Materials
Aluminum
Entre nous II
By Karine Payette
Located in Montreal, Quebec
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...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Photographic Paper
Basalt Cliff
By Holly King
Located in Montreal, Quebec
King creates large format photographic landscapes in her studio with sculptural props and painted backdrops. She is interested in the tension between artifice and constructed realiti...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Photographic Paper
Different Geographies, Different Histories
By Jessica Houston
Located in Montreal, Quebec
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...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Photographic Paper
Shipwreck
By Holly King
Located in Montreal, Quebec
King creates large format photographic landscapes in her studio with sculptural props and painted backdrops. She is interested in the tension between artifice and constructed realiti...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Photographic Paper
World Beyond the Water
By Holly King
Located in Montreal, Quebec
Text by Amber Berson
Canadian photographer Holly King’s Mangrove series is an investigation into the artist’s own subconscious. The photographs border on the uncanny, although never uncomfortably so. Instead, her preternatural compositions engage the viewer’s curiosity – the viewer is not sure how to approach, and yet is drawn to do so. At times the images are reflective, occasionally disquieting and always thought provoking. The twisted roots of the mangrove forests that form the base of this series provide an entry point for an investigation into the shadowy parts of the artist’s imagination.
The differences between what we know to be real and what we perceive as real are often slight. The work of Holly King stems from an attempt to prevail over the uncharted territory of both her imagination and that which is perceived as true. In her creations, King endeavours to understand her subconscious mindscape as manifested through photographs recalling actual landscapes.
This new series, stemming from earlier pieces also focused on roots, reflects King’s interest in drawing, in the linear subject and in geometric abstraction. It is a move away from previous series – despite the photographic medium in which King works, her oeuvre has contained a certain painterly quality. These new photographs tend to melt into themselves, drawing the viewer in and letting the imagination drift. The Mangrove series causes the viewer to approach with at a slower pace, to investigate deeply into the darker nooks and crannies and to attempt to find reason within a work that so clearly plays with our understanding of real and imaginary.
Nothing is incidental in King’s photographs...
Category
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Photographic Paper
Crowned Seascape
By Holly King
Located in Montreal, Quebec
King creates large format photographic landscapes in her studio with sculptural props and painted backdrops. She is interested in the tension between artifice and constructed realiti...
Category
2010s Contemporary Montreal - Photography
Materials
Photographic Paper
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A trove of recently unearthed personal photos adds another dimension to the abundance of press images of the Fab Four.
Photographer to Know: Rinko Kawauchi
From toddlers playing to fires blazing, the Japanese lenswoman poetically captures fleeting dramas on planet Earth.