Nicholas Crombach

Momento

2017

Text by Terence Sharpe There is a moment in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) when the character Hari commits suicide by drinking liquid oxygen. As she is not actually a human, but an artificial hybrid product of the mysterious planet and the protagonists’ memories, she heals rapidly and is alive again minutes later. Her choice to take her own life is poignant, seemingly the action of a being becoming aware of its hopeless infinitude. Her realization that while the men will die on the space station or elsewhere, her existence is that of immortality, a deeply alienating notion that causes her to seek her own destruction. The Montreal artist Guillaume Lachapelle has one work that prompts a sense of eternal alienation that echoes Hari’s tragedy. The work greets the viewer with a empty doorway flanked by clinically white bookshelves...

Place des Arts in Montreal is pleased to present Arnait by Karine Giboulo in its exhibition hall, a space for citizen reflection open to all. Central to her process is a friendship d...

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 ...

Bevan Ramsay completed his graduate degree in sculpture nearly a decade ago, but it's only now that he feels he has truly graduated from his MFA. This liberating feeling comes with a...

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...

In 2015, I made a series of sculptures called "HYPERland" illustrating the utopia promised by the "liberal democracy" and the dystopia that is rather created by the market and financ...

Inspired by amateur archaeologists such as Heinrich Schliemann who discovered Troy and by past elaborate hoaxes like that of the Piltdown Man, Joshua travels the world performing sta...

Circus Seals , 2022 Polystyrene, wood, aluminum and industrial paints 35 x 45 x 5 cm 14 x 18 x 2 in As an Industrial designer, I was trained to perform the creative act of determi...

Circus bear on bicycle , 2022 Polystyrene, wood, aluminum and industrial paints 35 x 45 x 5 cm 14 x 18 x 2 in As an Industrial designer, I was trained t...

Circus Elephant , 2022 Polystyrene, wood, aluminum and industrial paints 40 x 35 x 5 cm 16 x 14 x 2 in As an Industrial designer, I was trained to perform the creative act of dete...

Bridge To Total Freedom No.3 (Diminishing Returns) (2017) by Gary Sczerbaniewicz. Wood, laser-cut MDF, cast plastic, plaster, ink, acrylic, paper.

**ANNUAL SUPER SALE UNTIL JUNE 15TH ONLY** **THIS PRICE WON'T BE REPEATED AGAIN THIS YEAR - TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IT** The "Lucky Baby Elephants" series is exclusive of Artist Mauro Oli...