Mari Ito

Origen Del Deseo II - 21st Century, Contemporary, Japanese Art, Sculpture

2019

Series: Origin of Desire Mari Ito was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1980. She majored in Nihonga, Japanese-style painting made with traditional practices, techniques and materials. She mo...

Joe, the Gorilla. Miquel Aparici's sculptures are surprising assemblages made from old objects that had other uses in the past, and which the artist re...

Miquel Aparici's sculptures are surprising assemblages made from old objects that had other uses in the past, and which the artist recovers and uses in ...

Pájaro Cresta Roja Miquel Aparici's sculptures are surprising assemblages made from old objects that had other uses in the past, and which the artist recovers and uses in a creative...

Miquel Aparici's sculptures are surprising assemblages made from old objects that had other uses in the past, and which the artist recovers and uses in a creative and ingenious way. ...

Miquel Aparici's sculptures are surprising assemblages made from old objects that had other uses in the past, and which the artist recovers and uses in ...

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...

Based on her breathtaking golden faces chandelier named Cover-Discover, made for the Tel Aviv 2020 Biannale, Dana Bloom is now offering a limited edition of...

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 ...

"We surround ourselves with elements from nature in the form of manicured lawns, sculpted trees, and our domesticated companions. We bend the natural world to our tastes and create a...

Rachel Denny's work is an exploration of the seductive beauty of our natural world and the imprint that human intervention has made on its flora and fauna. Denny is best known for he...

'We surround ourselves with elements from nature in the form of manicured lawns, sculpted trees, and our domesticated companions. We bend the natural world to our tastes and create a...